














ee = 


Ss 


\ 


Py eec Lyon 


As 
ine ae: é 
seas & 








¥ 


if 


3 


ns 


Sad 
oe 


* 





WHY WE BEHAVE 
LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


HARPER'S 
MODERN SCIENCE 
SERIES 


Sir Witu1am Braao, K.B.E., D.Sc., F.R.S. 


Concerning the Nature of Things 





Ricoarp Swann LULL, Ph.D., D.Sc. 


Professor of Paleontology, Yale University; Directcr, 
Peabody Museum; Fellow of the American Academy 
of Arts and Sciences, etc. 


The Ways of Life 





Grorce A. Dorszy, LL.D., Ph.D. 


Formerly Curator of Anthropology, Field Museum, 
and Associate Professor of Anthropology, University 
of Chicago. 


Why We Behave Like Human Beings 


BERTRAND RUSSELL 


The A BC of Relativity 


{N PREPARATION 
Epwin Grant CongLIN, Ph.D., Sc.D. 


Professor of Biology, Princeton University; Fellow of 
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, etc. 


The Revolt Against Darwinism 


Cares SINGER, D.Litt., M.D., F.R.C.P., F.S.A. 


Late University Lecturer in History of Biological 
Sciences, Oxford. 


History of Science 





HARPER &% BROTHERS 
PUBLISHERS 


WHY WE BEHAVE <_... 
LIKE HUMAN BEINGS | 


BY 


GEORGE A, DorsEY, PuH.D., LL.D 


Formerly Associate Professor of Anthropology 
University of Chicago, and 
Curator of Anthropology 
Field Museum of Natural History 





Publishers 
Harper & BROTHERS 
New York and London 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKES 
HUMAN BEINGS 





Copyright, 1925, by 
HARPER & BROTHERS 
Printed in the U. S. A. 





Forty-Ninth Printing 
K-D 


TO 


FATHER AND MoTHER 


Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https://archive.org/details/whywebehavelikehOOdors_1 


CONTENTS 


EREWA GEN srk toate SM, FANG, WR Mota GRR CR Ack Ae OA Aa hcg xi 
CuapTer [. Tue InpivipuaL Lire CycLe AND THE HumMAN Race 
iene op rOLaile ss ici) eek me mete eb gals ieee Bnei 1 
Zee He ee MpryOnicnGerti-lLayers ie. pues neue stay te ne 3 
Smubeubetaly Grl-Gletisn gy we veh tirn al ed vical Ny tuys 6 
feel bey etal Nervous Oyster. eh iin eeu iit in carat: o 
Deel nevletalyokin\and: senseyOreanss ees bern 12 
6. The Fetal Urogenital System ...... Tot lCeore By a 16 
oe neshetalvAlimentary,Ganalieey mee ee ek a ea, 19 
Gra lwWitismatic pI VEOnSLersin reer ar votunli cts TOM e. Mea HN cit tit 22 
9. Walking Museums of Anatomy ........... 25 
ism nerViatiring a DOC yah ie (Al aehGh ie Wels Ak aca car vat 32 
febhegAdultrand: senile: Body yanmar (ew cog den 34 
fom lbertuman Race: tis te hone wen CTO A Me INT it set 38 
Jai betlwo Great Divisions of Manis ).)).o a oe. 4A, 
The TICES EM ate Bc cran Ween TCR oes BAN RE a, OS A7 
HOME CUTAINEXt-Ol-Kain-lavin ow gy ct. hn st PNURL Oe (go Mecge ag ers 49 
POm@nanoing, LmbSsie eon, Cn ana Vy hice a, 53 
Poemiller acc tO) bealiumanicahno acct wear ties wets Oba 56 
CuHaptTer I]. Tue EvoLutTion oF THE EARTH, LIFE, AND SEX 
de LitesGenealosic Limetable eae, Me 60 
mat nepiands hat Rocksithe Gradlen het. i RP 65 
SES PELIMENtS NPDIAls i) Vee ee ayy bate el ot hash 2 69 
4, New Styles in Eggs and Incubators. ........ 71 
POuremacbteduess to Mish mem iwa wee convo catia 73 
Gaback; to, the: leifeless) Barth yi haa a Re T GON. iy A ice. 77 
Glue startatrom ithe oUnwmec ii esse Pol any so) ce cual ans 80 
GurLhcelaieNiscofs Naturer iti wl gry Matraues vel ielyeuls 82 
9. The Fitness of Water and Carbon Dioxide. ... . . 86 
PU me hesevoOlutonionnthenOreanich. i.) Weotie tuk teciaitem bia. 92 


vil 


CONTENTS 


. Darwin ‘and’ Natural) Selection, iam.) 2) ail eee 97 
. Lamarck and Acquired Characters: ......... 102 
| The: Nature ‘and Evolution of (Sex 4)... /4)0.9 eae 105 
. The, Colored’ Bodies ofvthemiopini 0) e 9 a peeeae 110 
» The; Great:'Game/ot! Heredity) (00 ee. ee er 112 
> Eugenics, on‘ Being WelliBred/,4) eyes. 0) eae 116 


CHAPTER III. Tue Processes oF LIVING AND THE 
GERMS OF DISEASE 


A 
m 
3 
4 
5 
6 
re 
8 
2 
10 
Il. 
12 
1s 
14 
15 
16 
Lif 


. Life Is Change and Requires Energy... . . .... . 120 
ol he-Bodyvis\ayLivine) Machinew je tr an ee 123 
Tt Requires! Galories ivy yes on ea ee 127 
« Why We'\Must (Digest: Foodie nya eee cnnoiee 130 
‘The: Digestive) System 9) oi ane ten a ee 133 
. Our Daily! Bread) andvW ater eos. ee ie ee Lbaiye 
s peeing Food: Throughithe \Canalwey ayia ee 146 
i) How! Foodiis Absorbediiat en iey an nemesis ea 154, 
sithe Fleshiis in) the:Blood jac wee ee 159 
+ How the “Flesh’Is Transported.) 90 oy.) ies 164 

Giving the Blood thevAiry 0) Wise acme eed Tet ene 167 
» Fhe Great“Blood)Puritier ie ea eee er 170 
> Lhe" Red: Blood-Gells) yy na eee ae ene 173 
? The: Body, Thermostat 2/00 4.7 ear hat it en aera 177 
The Role jof the; Duct Glandsiqony2),2) oan ee ee 183 
svThe' “Little yF leas i090), iain bm one eink eee ane eee 186 
3 The’ Deadly:Germs )) 08. CA La Sa aa tea 194, 


CHAPTER IV. THE ENDOCRINE GLANDS AND THE CAUSES 


OF DEATH 

I. Endocrine Glands and Hormones. . ......:. 201 
2. >The; Phyroid:Glandgyy ins vi i.e Ja ea cnn ee ae 204, 
3. The Parathyroid and Thymus Glandsiye Ai ee eee 206 
4: The ‘Adrenal (Glands sii) 7 Nv ae aie ip ie 208 
5. The Emergency Functions of the Adrenals 20 egunem 212 
6: ‘The: Pituitary) and) Pineal, Glands) 79 2) 2 ee 215 
7. The Pancreas—and Other “Sweetbreads” ..... . 219 
8. Introducing the, Gonads ayy 00 i. ane te me 221 
9.The Dual Role ofthe (Gonads cy ae 224 
10.) The \Female?Gonads 7 inars) coe erie ae  e 226 
1d The; Male) Gonads) iit ec oe gee Ree eee 229 


CONTENTS: 


HZ secondary oexual Characters iat) aha der. wee ee 
3 Lhe Mores Hitman: Sex tere .: vr ete a one Pelee IDR 
i470 tindocrine, Hacts) and Wancies) errs oi ras eee 
15. The Individual That Is Regulated. . ........ 
16. “How Can a Man Be Born When He Is Old?” . . . . . 
17. One Good Defect Deserves Another. ........ 
18. The Parts That Wear Out First 
19. The Best Life Insurance 
20. Our Total Mileage 


CHO Pee, Oe Reh ell ser a cent ie Our de ere 1) aw 
een! Kae oF ort Velen oe!) Bie ere ver bre 


Pte 9) esa e:) 6 he gee erie oy atin! Spiele ee ce. ite. be er Fle: 


CuHapTer V. THE INTEGRATING ORGAN AND MECHANISM 
OF ADJUSTMENT 

. The Old and the New Psychology ea wt gem eae anh ulin gh a A 
meLbe impulse stonLiveror yoni caunpvg qe ait een on 
. Samples of Low Life Behavior ern ase o. 
LhewAnimalo Mind) estima heretke dein tanks 
The Excitability of Living Marecmiy cde ale 
The Nature of the Reflex Ave A meek EME A, ate ae CTL 


. Reflex eaten Ne SRO ML Vere NPRM Can. mh pes in en Ea 
meuneyNatirerol Nerves son, 0 ibe aetaremin cand je'rtan nen ake 
Ue inew Ww Orldiyas jSEMUISy.facse Guu mco yal eQnal oh along a 
Diss Receptors ob oizbts andimoundsi ia Gil. wy. Iu vk 
Poreneceptors of; Chemical Stimuli a hiss one 
13. Visceral and Kinesthetic ‘Receptors: 2.005) 2) (2) 4.) 
14. The Nervous System . 

15. The Lower Centers of the Nervous System 

16. The Supreme Adjustor . Lidia We mL enh 
17. The Pictured Movements of the etn ILENE Ru ERG a 
iSeLnes Conditioned Helex Neen ee ae) se Me 
19. The Autonomic Nervous System ........ 
POM TADS PATC ALEC i umn edie) dasleitec hc: ue mellktat tas aig 
Cie Mind and Consciousnessiayis tees ovules) eae Yaar 


OONAKDAWN 


Cuapter VI. Acgutrinc HuMAN BEHAVIOR 
DA Storkis-eve Views ol, tile, DADVin i. vai. ial (in cis @urt ot. 
Instinctive Behavior ME Ye 
. Organizing the Kinesthetic eenee MEAN UE al ate aT a 


mp 
3 
4, The Renee Basis of Habits . 
5) 


MP PAvwanaeinitalone re NM ayn Ure TRH hal on te lke 


ix 


CONTENTS 


6. The Laws. of ‘Habit Mormations (i). ol 029 aes 306 
7. Instinctive, Emergency Behavior®. 15°30... 19% ens 309 
8) The ‘Fear-Hate; Organization® 5.5) (rs) eee 363 
9. Childhood’s: “Unconscious Mind 1.7) 209) ae 368 
10. The Habit-ofianguage var ger nie, he 372 
I1.Verbalized, Oreanization ws, ay Vere. eee he eae 377 
12. Adjustment by Thought and a Words() i nem 381 
13. Learning and Remen ners Co ORDO: 7 Gt iA nee 385 
L4.° The Changing). oituationy ny) ye nena, ete 388 
15. Positive and Negative Adaptations inde ae ore eae ane 391 
16. Hows Habits yAre) (Broken siya eae ee ee 393 
LZ The Habitcofy sleeps.) nae ee . 396 
18. “Prophecy lies in .. . ‘I have dreamedici) We 400 
19; Learning::to: Know ti. 8 ik 2 Se coe 403 
20.) Knowing) and, Believing 1) a) 2, hs ei 408 
21. The Individuality of Response (9) 205) 2) 9 eee 412 


CHAPTER VII. FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE NEWER 
PsycHOLOGY 


i; [nstinctivey Activities “wah is) eet oe . . 416 

2) The; Hunger (Complexiviyy 0) ares 420 

3: The Complex: Appetite.) 2 8esh 2 424, 

4, The: Sex Complex ))o 200nei ony) Bien ee 427 

9. Love's Coming-of-Age: U0 ta 431 

6. Bisexual Behavior. eve is 2) 0 5) aera ae A35 

7. Conditioning, the Sex Complex 5003 ee A3E 
§.-Marriage ‘Behavior ice La yi ee . 441 

9. Freud’s Devil and Other ipevchoees SS a ea 4A7 
10." Fake Psychology nies y ety oun ey en 452 
Il. Reading the Mind PIERO ARTA MRL ech 455 
I2.’Measuring Intellisences 20.0296. te 458 
13% Character and ;Personality.. |) 70h. a 461 
14, The Ideal in) Human Behavior!)13).)2,) i ee 464 
15, Socially, Useful “Behavior 7 4) ee) he A71 
16, The Goal of Creative Evolution’). 23°.) fee 477 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 75) 0ury ian ma ieee ei Nit iiss LEE A ae ae 485 
INDERE TAOS Re GAN Ca deere een de Lote hated) eles 489 


PREFACE 


a poe beings are the most interesting objects on earth, 
and to know themselves and get along with one another 
‘is their most important business. That business drags 
because they do not know where they come from, how 
they get here, what they bring with them, what they do with 
it, and what they could do if they stopped quarreling among 
themselves and used their brains to solve their common 
problems. It will speed up when the raw materials of human 
nature and the possibilities of intelligent behavior are more 
generally understood. The facts for such an understanding 
are known, but they belong to several sciences and are scat- 
tered through many libraries. To pick them out, put them in 
order, and make them tell a complete and up-to-date story 
that can be held in one hand and read without a dictionary 
is the object of Why We Behave Like Human Beings. 

“Complete” is a large word and must be taken with a grain 
of salt. Nothing is really complete in this world of ceaseless 
change and expanding horizon. The earth itself is not the 
earth it used to be when I first went to school. Man’s story 
will be complete when there is no human being left to tell 
the tale. Keibel and Mall’s Human Embryology, with 1,600 
pages, is more complete than Minot’s, with only 800. 
Quain’s Human Anatomy, with 2,000 pages, is more complete 
than the average textbook of anatomy, with only 1,000. 
This is not a textbook; the changing human body, from a 
rejuvenated ovum to senile decay, and its origin from 
primordial protoplasm, are part of this story. 

Nor is “‘up-to-date” to be taken too literally. Science moves 
fast these days. I may state that the hormone of a certain 

xi 


PREFACE 


gland is “not yet known”; Professor John Abel may have 
isolated it yesterday and announce the fact next year. When 
I studied anatomy under Thomas Dwight—to whom I owe 
much—lI was told nothing about a certain little gland in our 
throat without which we cannot live. The activating principle 
of that gland has been discovered, and the secretion of an- 
other vital gland has been isolated, since I wrote the first 
word of this book. No one had heard of a vitamin a few 
years ago, nor had any vitamin been isolated when I began 
this book; one, and possibly two, has since been isolated. 

By “complete” I mean comprehensive. This is the most 
comprehensive account of human beings that I know of. 
It is as up-to-date as I can make it. It moves as fast as I 
can make it, and avoids blind alleys which lead nowhere. 
It does touch many problems not yet solved or only partially 
guessed at; its handling of such problems is as sound and 
sane as I can make it with the help of many friends. This 
does not commit them for my errors of omission and com- 
mission, nor lessen my responsibility for statements of fact 
or inferences from facts and hypotheses—nor signify that 
they approve an anthropologist’s use of their materials for 
his story. 

The paleontologist, for example, claims fossils. But when 
he finds a skull which he says belonged to an ape-man or 
to a man-ape, that skull belongs to me also; when he finds a 
set of dinosaur eggs, I am not interested: there are no dino- 
saurs in our family album. The bacteriologist and a dozen 
other ’ologists, as well as the family doctor and dentist, deal 
in bacteria; as do I also, in setting forth the rdle these 
amazing little imps have played in organic evolution and in 
the life and death of human beings. The physiologist—and 
presumably every scientist—is interested in the news about 
the endocrine glands. The news is startling; but much that 
is not yet known or is known to be false has been so capital- 
ized by quacks and marvelmongers that I have tried to sepa- 
rate the glands from the grafters. Different scientists 

xii 


‘ 


PREFACE 


specialize in psychic behavior. Psychics and pseudo-psy- 
chologists exploit it; they too belong to the story of why 
were human. In short, my attitude is that any science which 
holds itself aloof from life and nowhere comes in contact 
with human beings is as barren as a Vestal Virgin and as dry 
as a prayer for rain for the purpose of this book; but that 
the scandalmongers of science who would fill their lamps at 
the expense of the gullible, and who illumine no path of life 
nor sustain any living germ, should be illuminated. 

This book does not presume to offer a Philosophy of Life 
or suggest Science as a substitute for Religion. But as 
philosophy was moonshine until it began to investigate the 
elementary properties of matter and energy, so, I suspect, 
religion will be subject to quackery and hypocrisy until 
humanity itself becomes more humane than human nature 
and religion itself ceases worrying about heaven and hell 
and devotes its energies to making this earth a paradise. 

Nor, in ascribing “‘mind”’ to a specific irritability of proto- 
plasm and human actions to definite forms of energy, does 
this book pretend to “resolve life.” Life is more easily 
destroyed than resolved, or even defined. Nobody knows 
what life is. Much is known of living processes. Of the 
electric change accompanying irritability, of the action of 
X-rays on living protoplasm and of heat, light, and sound 
waves on sensitive human bodies, not much is yet known. 
But those energies and the living mechanisms which react 
to their stimuli can be investigated. The few crumbs that 
science can offer are more nourishing than the no-bread 
of speculation which works without oxygen, ignores carbon- 
compounds, and defies the lightning. 

Parts of the chapter on the “Processes of Living” will be 
difficult for those unfamiliar with HzO and COz. Some may 
even sympathize with the French Republic of 1794 for having 
beheaded the man who said that life is a chemical function, 
But Lavoisier was right: life is a chemical function—and 

xiii 


PREFACE 


living actions are largely concerned with conjugating the 
verb to eat. Without some idea of oxidation processes, of 
the chemical structure of food, and of the chemical reactions 
in digestion, visceral behavior is a blank. And without some 
understanding of visceral behavior, psychic behavior is up 
in the air. Life became a science when interest shifted 
from the dissection of dead bodies to the study of action in 
living beings and the nature of the environment they live in. 

To those scientists who have given me of their time and 
learning I am profoundly indebted and here offer my grate- 
ful thanks: to Dr. W. I. Thomas, who read the entire MS.; 
to Dr. Adolph H. Schultz, of the Carnegie Institution of 
Washington, Department of Embryology, Johns Hopkins Uni- 
versity, who read Chapter I; to Professor Franz Boas, of 
Columbia University, who read parts of Chapter I; to Pro- 
fessor George Grant MacCurdy, of Yale University, who 
read parts of Chapters I and II; to Professor W. E. Castle, 
of Harvard University, who read Chapter II; to Professor 
Richard Swan Lull, of Yale University, who read Chapter II 
and parts of Chapter I; to Professor Walter B. Cannon, of 
Harvard University, who read part of Chapter III; to Dr. 
McKeen Cattell, of the Cornell University Medical School, 
who read Chapter III; to Professor A. J. Carlson, of the 
University of Chicago, who read Chapter IV; to Professor 
C. Judson Herrick, of the University of Chicago, who read 
Chapter V; and to Dr. John B. Watson, who read Chapters VI 
and VII. 

I am also indebted to Professor Carlson for the privilege 
of examining, while in proof, his chapter on Organothera- 
peutics in the Blumer edition of Billings-Forchheimer’s 
Therapeusis of Internal Diseases; and to Professor John J. 
Abel of Johns Hopkins University, Professor R. G. Hoskins 
of the Ohio State University, Dr. C. R. Moore of the Univer- 
sity of Chicago, and Dr. John B. Watson, for reprints of 
articles and for valued suggestions. 

XIV 


PREFACE 


Two names I wish especially to mention: Professor Franz 
Boas, unfailing source of inspiration to all American an- 
thropologists; my wife Sue, untiring and indispensable ally 
in all that has gone into the writing of this book. 


Grorcre A. DorRSEY. 
New York City, June 1, 1925. 





WHY WE BEHAVE 
LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 





se 


“So eine Arbeit wird eigentlich nie fertig” 





= % 


GorTHE 


ni 
nin 





CHAPTER I 


THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE CYCLE AND THE HUMAN RACE 


1. The Egg of Life. 2. The Embryonic Germ-Layers. 3. The Fetal Gill- 
Clefts. 4. The Fetal Nervous System. 5. The Fetal Skin and Sense Organs. 
6. The Fetal Urogenital System. 7. The Fetal Alimentary Canal. 8. Twins 
and Monsters. 9. Walking Muséums of Anatomy. 10. The Maturing Body. 
11. The Adult and Senile Body. 12. The Human Race. 13. The Two Great 
Divisions of Man. 14. Fossil Man. 15. Our Next-of-Kin-Living. 16. Changing 
Limbs. 17. The Race to Be Humane. 


I 


WE know of only three kinds of living beings: bacteria, 
plants, animals. All living beings have a physical body or 
structure made up of a few of the more common chemical 
elements. This body is called protoplasm, the stuff of all 
living things. Living protoplasm occurs only in units called 
cells. Every living being is or has been a cell. Cells are 
always small and generally cannot be seen except under the 
microscope. 

Many animals consist of just one cell, and hence are 
called unicellular organisms. Yet that cell suffices for them 
to live; they eat, they excrete, they grow, they multiply; 
they obey all the laws of living organisms. For living pur- 
poses they are complete. Higher animals have bodies of 
many cells, and are called Metazoa to distinguish them from 
the Protozoa, or unicellular animals. 

We are animals and belong to the Metazoa group. Our 
body consists of about twenty-six thousand billion cells. 
Each cell is alive and must be nourished or it dies. 

The cells which make up our body are of different forms 
avd shapes and, except the free floating cells carried by the 

1 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


blued, are united into different kinds of tissue to form the 
organs and systems of our body. But a section cut anywhere 
from the body—from bone, muscle, eye, tongue, skin, heart— 
would under the microscope be seen to consist of tiny cells, 
each a complete unit of protoplasm. 

Our body begins its individual growth and development as 
one cell, the germ-cell or fertilized ovum (egg). By fer- 
tilization, the ovum, an old cell, is stimulated to begin a new 
life; itis made young again. Being rejuvenated, it can grow, 
and grow old. 

The germ-cells (female, or ova; male, or spermia) are 
readily distinguishable under the microscope. Ova are much 
larger and less active than spermia. The latter are very 
active, and propel themselves by a whip-lash tail. Both are 
complete living organisms and in their combined bodies 
carry immortality. In general features, size, structure, etc., 
human germ-cells closely resemble those of other mammals. 

The human ovum was first discovered in 1827. Although 
it is the largest of the cells in the body, fifty thousand could 
be mailed across the continent for a two-cent stamp; one 
hundred could ride on an inch-long spider web. 

In both sexes, the germ-cells mature normally only from 
the beginning of puberty. The ova develop in little pockets 
or follicles of the ovaries. There are about 70,000 follicles 
at birth. By the eighth year there are less than 40,000; of 
these only about 200 develop into true Graafian follicles. 
One of these, containing a single ovum, matures each lunar 
month of life between puberty and the menopause. It es- 
capes through the ruptured wall of the ovary and enters the 
Fallopian tube, presumably two weeks before the onset of 
menstruation. For each mature ovum thus released each 
lunar month, the male develops about 850,000,000,000 
spermia. | 

One spermium only enters into the body of the matured 
ovum, leaving its tail outside. The ovum is now fertilized. 
It divides into two cells; these two divide and become four, 

2 


THE LIFE CYCLE AND THE HUMAN RACE 


etc. In nine months, one fertilized ovum has grown five 
million per cent and increased in volume one billion times; 
by maturity it will have increased in volume fifteen billion 
times. 

After the fertilized ovum has by division become many 
thousands, certain cells under the microscope may be dis- 
tinguished from the others. These are to become the germ- 
cells of new individuals, tiny sparks of immortality, endowed 
with the capacity to hand life on to the next generation. 

The other cells of the tiny embryo are called soma, or 
body cells. They also grow and multiply by division, and 
assume special shapes to fit them to form the tissues and 
organs of the body—nerves, eyes, bone, teeth, heart, muscle, 
blood, etc. Having specialized or become differentiated, 
they cannot unite with other cells to start new lives—they are 
not germ-cells. 


vs 


We hear much of adaptations. Every living animal is 
adapted” or it could not live. What it is adapted to and 
what it adapts itself with depend on the animal and the 
stage of its development. The tiny germ-cell in the hen’s 
egg is adapted to an environment of yolk and albumin. It 
draws on these for its nourishment. The human ovum has 
no such store of food to draw upon. It is adapted to a 
different environment. For 280 days it is to live the life of 
.a true parasite. It must therefore attach itself to a living 
wall, from which it can derive its supplies for living and 
for growth. These early adaptations of the human ovum are 
of great interest. 

But the interest will be increased if we have before us a 
law of biology which says that individual development re- 
hearses or recapitulates the life history of the species. This 
means that our individual prenatal and postnatal growth up 
to the time of adolescence is a résumé of the evolution of the 

3 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


human race. It does not mean that at one stage of develop- 
ment the fetus is a fish, or a reptile; it does say that the 
ovum develops along the road our ancestors traveled in 
becoming human. 

We begin our individual existence as a protozoon or single- 
celled animal; not until the end of the third month has the 
fetus the essential parts of a fairly complete human being. 
During the last six months the fetus grows more human; the 
parts begin to mature, and for years after birth keep on 
maturing. 

The embryo begins at once to develop from its own body 
the two fetal membranes or envelopes. The inner one, or — 
amnion (lamb), fills with a pint or more of water. In this 
the embryo floats, and consequently any pressure to which 
it is subjected becomes more evenly distributed. By a special 
growth called placenta (cake, because of its shape) of the 
outer membrane or chorion (skin), the embryo attaches itself 
to the wall of the uterus. 

Through this placenta the parasite embryo derives food 
and oxygen. But it develops its own blood and its own 
circulatory and digestive systems: they are at all times quite 
distinct from its host’s. She supplies what the chick embryo 
receives from the hen egg: support, protection, water, food, 
fuel, oxygen. 

Both fetal membranes and placenta follow the child at 
birth. The child is freed from the placenta by severing its 
umbilical cord; our navel is the scar. 

In other mammals these membranes are not formed so 
early, but the upright gait of man seems to put more strain 
on the abdominal viscera and presumably subjects the embryo 
co greater pressure. It needs all the protection it can get, 
hence this marvelous intrauterine adaptation to the upright 
posture. Anthropoid apes have the human type of uterus and 
a near-upright gait; their fetal membranes are also formed 
earlier than in other mammals. 

To return to the embryo proper. The ovum divides, the 

4 


THE LIFE CYCLE AND THE HUMAN RACE 


two daughter-cells divide. Four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, 
etc. As a result of this rapid division, multiplication, and 
growth, the embryo passes through certain definite stages of 
development. Much is still conjecture. For this reason: 
The earliest stages of embryonic development of fishes, am- 
phibians, birds, and of such domesticated mammals as the 
guinea-pig, rabbit, sheep, and pig are known, and much may 
be inferred as to the course of development of the human 
embryo from what is known to take place in these animals. 
But no one has yet seen a fertilized human ovum, nor has 
anyone yet seen a human embryo that had not already had 
ten days’ growth—and it measured about one one-hundredth 
of an inch in length. Even of the second week of human 
development almost nothing is definitely known, and of em- 
bryos of the third week the Carnegie Laboratory of Embry- 
ology has been able to assemble only fourteen specimens. 
What actually goes on, then, during the first eighteen days of 
man’s intrauterine existence can as yet only be inferred from 
known facts of lower mammalian embryonic development. 
First of the hypothetical stages is the morula (little mul- 
berry): the embryo is a minute cluster of cells. Next is the 
blastula stage, or blastoderm (germ-skin); the embryo is 
supposed to form a hollow sphere. This caves in on one side, 
forming a U-shaped affair, and represents the gastrula 
(stomach) stage. By this infolding, certain cells which were 
on the outside now lie inside the body; the embryo consists 
of two layers. By further infoldings, there is an additional 
layer between these two. Thus we have the famous and 
important germ-layers: the outer or ectoderm; the inner or 
endoderm; the middle or mesoderm. 
Each germ-layer gives rise to certain organs and systems, 
a fact of far-reaching consequence in medicine and hygiene 
and in an understanding of our body. The three layers and 
their derived structures are: 
I. Ectoderm: skin and skin accessories; entire nervous 
3 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


system; special sense organs; pineal gland and part of the 
pituitary and adrenal giands. 

II. Endoderm: alimentary canal and appendages; thy- 
roid and thymus glands; larynx, trachea, and lungs. 

III. Mesoderm: voluntary or skeletal muscles; urogenital 
system and sex glands; part of the adrenal glands. 

In addition to these three layers, a particular type of tissue 
develops, chiefly from the mesoderm. Its cells are branched 
and form a network of connective tissue. From it are de- 
rived the heart, blood, blood vessels, and lymphatic system; 
skeleton; and visceral or involuntary muscles. 

All one-cell animals consist of an outside and “insides.” 
Through their outside membrane or cell wall they keep in 
touch with the world. Our keep-in-touch-with-the-world 
mechanisms (skin, hair, nails, all skin-glands and organs, 
lining of mouth, enamel of teeth, special sense organs, and 
entire nervous system) are all derived from the outside cells 
of the original hollow body when it caved in to bury certain 
cells inside the body. From those inside cells we develop 
““insides’—food and air canals. Muscles and skeleton, 
blood, sex organs, etc., did not appear until animal life had 
made much progress in evolution. 

During our early prenatal days we live fast; we can be 
certain of that. In a few days we have developed structures 
that were evolved only after tens of millions of years. 


3 


Within two weeks the embryo has become a minute plate- 
like structure with a streak across it. By the third week this 
streak opens into the plate at both ends. One opening 
becomes the mouth. The cavity within the embryo will 
divide and become the thoracic and abdominal cavities. 

Meanwhile, a series of lines appear, dividing the plate-like 
embryo into segments. Segmented animals, such as worms 
and insects, retain these segments; as do fishes in muscles, 


6 


THE LIFE CYCLE AND THE HUMAN RACE 


ribs, and vertebre; as do we in our ribs, vertebra, and the 
muscles between the ribs. Our floating ribs are simply in- 
complete ribs, but we have vestiges of ribs all the way down 
our spine. Those below the chest fuse with outgrowths 
from the vertebre and are called lateral processes. 

The vast majority of animals have no backbone, and are 
called Invertebrates. One of the greatest steps in evolution 
was a backbone or vertebral column. Three types were tried 
out before Vertebrates developed a true backbone. All three 
types or stages appear in the developing human embryo. The 
notochord or permanent body axis of the lowest fishes appears 
early; later it is obliterated by the bodies of the vertebre, 
but traces of the notochord may persist and lead to tumors 
in adult life. Our bony vertebre proper are preceded by 
cartilage, the only backbone sharks have. This is replaced 
by bone. 

Our skull and limb bones also begin as cartilage—and in 
some fishes the skull remains cartilage. Much of our long 
bones and skull is still cartilage at birth; hence the pliancy 
of the new born’s head. 

Shark embryos have five gill-arches with openings, or gill. 
clefts, between, and two branchial arches from which the 
shark forms its poorly developed lower jaw. 

Most of these arches and the branchial clefis between 
appear at the third week in the human fetus. The way the 
clefts disappear and the arches develop into the extraordi- 
narily complicated human throat is possibly the most 
interesting and confused chapter in human embryology. 

From one of the two arches which develop into jaws in 
sharks, the human fetus develops its lower jaw and two of 
the three tiny bones of the inner ear; from the other arch, the 
third bone of the inner ear, the styloid process at the base 
of the skull, and the cartilage of the external ear. The 
hyoid apparatus which supports our tongue develops also 
from this and from the first gill-arch. The second and third 

7 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


gill-arches become the thyroid cartilages, or Adam’s apple; 
the fourth, the epiglottis; the fifth, the windpipe cartilages. 

As the human embryo will develop into a lung-breather 
and will have no need of gills, the gill-clefts do not break 
through; after the sixth week no outward trace of them 
remains. But around one end of the first cleft the fetal ear 
develops; the remainder becomes the Eustachian tube, or 
passage from the mouth to the tympanic cavity of the ear. 

The second branchial arch, from which fish embryos de- 
velop gill-cover and gill muscles, is supplied by the seventh 
cranial nerve. This arch in the human fetus is also supplied 
by that nerve; it grows upward and becomes the great nerve 
of our face, supplying ears, mouth, nose, and eyes. An 
amazing story, this. The nerves of our face moved the 
gill-covers of our respiratory system when we were fishes. 

Six branches of the aorta—the great artery from the 
heart—supply these fish-like arches of the human fetus. 
The third pair become part of the two internal carotid 
arteries. The left branch of the fourth pair forms the bend 
of the aorta. Of the sixth pair, one part becomes the stem 
of the pulmonary artery; the other, during fetal life, carries 
blood from the pulmonary artery to the aorta, thus permitting 
the right ventricle of the heart to pump impure blood into 
the aorta and so to the placenta. At birth it closes; blood 
from the pulmonary artery must now pass to the lungs. 

Marvelous adaptation! Part of a gill-arch artery used for 
placental circulation closed suddenly to meet the infant’s 
ery for air! Henceforth the infant gets oxygen from its own 
Jungs and not from its mother’s blood. 

During fetal life, the third and fourth clefts become cov: 
ered by a fold from the second arch. A fistula may develop 
here—remnant of an enclosed gill chamber. The middle ear, 
site of the first fetal gill-cleft, is more prone to serious 
trouble. Tags of skin which may persist on the side or front 
of our neck are less serious, but none the less echoes of our 
gill-clefts, reminders of our kinship with the finny tribes. 

3 


THE LIFE CYCLE AND THE HUMAN RACE 


At the time the gill-clefts are present the human fetus has 
a freely projecting tail and four tiny paddle-like limbs. 


4 


The ovum only grows and develops if it can come in contact 
with food; the cells remain alive only as long as they are 
nourished. This gives us a clue to some of the mechanisms or 
organ-systems which the human embryo must develop and 
which we must keep in repair during life. Whether we are 
a one-cell embryo or a new-born or an adult, we must be 
able to get food and oxygen and distribute food and oxygen 
where needed. We have such organ-systems: digestive, cir- 
culatory, respiratory, etc.; and a motor mechanism of bones 
and muscles. 

A fundamental criterion of living protoplasm is its capac- 
ity to get excited. Because of this irritable nature it does 
something—it reacts like a living thing. The “organ-system,” 
or mechanism of reactions, is the nervous system in man 
and in all animals with a nervous system. But just as we 
must infer that the ovum can “breathe,” although it has no 
lungs, we must infer that it can react, although it has no 
nervous system. 

It is vitally important that at every stage of pre- or post- 
natal life the organism have all the structure or mechanism 
required for living purposes; it only needs to make living 
response to living environment. The nervous system comes 
to be the visible mechanism by action in which the organism 
makes such vital responses to vital situations. 

Our nervous system is the most complex mechanism in the 
universe; certainly no other system in our body’is to be 
compared with it in intricacy or in its unique -capacity to 
learn. Because of this capacity, the evolution of man became 
possible and we are what we are. In fact, the goal of evolu- 
tion, as we shall see, was always in the direction of a broader 
outlook, a greater capacity to anticipate change and weather 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


storm. The nervous sysiem is the only key evolved to unlock 
the future. We shall pay due respect to it; at this point we 
can only glance at its structural development. 

Before the embryo is a month old, a depression or trough 
appears on the upper surface of the outer germ-layer. It 
deepens. The upper edges come together, forming the neural 
tube, so called because from it will develop the nervous 
system. In the third month the tube expands at one end into 
three sacs or vesicles; the first and third of these divide and 
there result five vesicles in all. The walls of these hollow 
sacs will develop into the brain; the sacs themselves will form 
the ventricles (little belly) of the brain. 

The remainder of the neural tube will become the spinal 
cord. This, in the four-months’ embryo, is as long as the 
vertebral column; thereafter the column grows faster than 
the cord. At birth, the cord proper reaches only to the third 
lumbar vertebre; but from that vertebre to the end of the 
column the cord is represented by the long terminal filament. 
This atavistic ending of the spinal cord is found in mammals 
generally, and points back to a time in man’s ancestry when 
the cord extended the entire length of the column. 

The cells of the neural tube send out two processes: one 
connects with a process from another cell of the central 
system; the other grows out toward the surface of the body. 
By birth, all parts of the body are connected by these proc- 
esses with central—spinal cord and brain—and by the other 
processes, all parts of central are connected with one another. 
At birth, all the cells of the nervous system are present. 
The new-born will develop no new brain cells, but structural 
changes will take place in the nerves which are in control 
of the motor mechanism; otherwise the infant would remain 
as helpless as when born. 

Sometimes the bones of the skull grow together prema- 
turely; this prevents further growth of the brain. Such a 
brain is called microcephalous and vaguely resembles the 
brain of monkeys. 

10 


THE LIFE CYCLE AND THE HUMAN RACE 


Monsters are sometimes delivered in which the brain has 
never developed beyond the first month of fetal life—the 
original nerve plate remains spread out on the surface at 
the back of the head. 

An English shepherd who died at the age of sixty was 
normal except for his very small head. He had a human 
countenance, but a vacant stare. He could count his fingers, 
but not his sheep or the days of the week. He could talk 
simple sentences. His brain was one-third normal size and its 
fissures were like a fetal brain of seven months, but lower 
in type than that of a chimpanzee. The parts associated with 
speech were of the size and form found in anthropoid apes. 
It was the type of brain our ancestors had millions of years 
ago. | 

Man’s brain is from two to three times larger than that 
of the gorilla, but, apart from mere size, man and ape brains 
are more alike than are their big toes. 

Brain weights vary enormously. The average for adult male 
Europeans is about 1,375 grams, for females about 1,235. 
The brain of Turgueneff, the Russian novelist, weighed 2,012 
grams. It is exceeded by that of only two others; one was an 
imbecile. Next in weight come a laborer (1,925 grams) and 
a bricklayer (1,900 grams). Gambetta’s brain weighed only 
1,294 grams. The largest woman’s brain recorded is 1,742 
grams; she was insane and died of consumption. ‘The third 
largest woman’s brain recorded weighed 1,580 grams; she 
also was insane. 

There is no evidence that size of brain (or of head) is 
necessarily connected with actual or potential intelligence. 
Usually, large individuals have large brains; men are larger 
than women. Large brains have no more units than small 
brains: the units are large. A small brain is no more neces- 
sarily handicapped than a small hand or a small foot. 

We do not use the brains we have. Presumably, we no 
more get the maximum service out of our brains than we 
do out of our motor-mechanism. For every book on how 

ll 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


to train the brain there are a dozen on how to train the mus- 
cles. But not one man in fifty who goes in for muscle-train- 
ing expects to put his muscles to work; he sees physical cul- 
ture as physical beauty. 


5 


We no longer tell friends from enemies by smell; but we 
often pick them by the shape of their nose. Man’s nose 
is not so striking as the elephant’s, or even the long-nosed 
monkey’s, but it features his face and is one of his most 
human and superfluous elements. As it 1s a new acquisition 
—it began with mammals—it appears late in fetal life and 
develops fully only after birth. Its shape and size are he- 
reditary and are distinguishing traits of race. But it has 
no more to do with brain power than the handkerchief that 
wipes it. 

As the olfactory nerves alone are connected with the hemi- 
spheres of the human brain, it is inferred that the brain it- 
self arose in connection with the sense of smell; the original 
brain was a smelling organ. 

In mammals generally, the smell sense is the most highly 
developed of all senses. In monkeys, it has already begun 
to diminish. Some mammals have five pairs of ridges sup- 
porting the olfactory organs; some hoofed animals have eight; 
apes usually have three. Man has from two to five pairs. 

The nose in the human embryo is at first a pair of pits or 
pockets in the skin—the condition in fishes. The external 
nose appears much later. 

Man’s reptilian ancestors had a supplementary smell 
organ between roof of mouth and floor of nose. With this 
they could sample odors while eating without having to 
sniff. We—in common with other mammals—have its ves- 
tige in our Jacobson’s organ. 

The ear also begins as a pocket, in the first gill-cleft. This 
sinks into the head until its outer opening is closed by the 

12 


THE LIFE CYCLE AND THE HUMAN RACE 


tympanum or eardrum. A rare anomaly is an individual with 
two, or even three, external ear openings; these represent the 
second and third gill-clefts. In some fishes the opening re- 
mains; their ear is primarily a balancing organ. Our equilib- 
rium sense organ is also located in the inner ear; if our 
semilunar canals are destroyed, we cannot balance ourselves. 

We turn our head toward sounds or cup our hands be- 
hind our ears; our ancestors turned their ears. We have 
vestiges of ear muscles, as do apes. Our external ears are 
also degenerate, as are those of the orang and gorilla. 
Some ears are small and lie tight against the head, as in the 
orang; some are large and stand out, as do those of the 
chimpanzee. 

At the eighth month the rim or helix of the fetal ear 
begins to fold in—an additional sign of degeneracy. But 
the tip persists and generally may be felt, often may be 
seen, near the middle of the infolded helix. It is called 
Darwin’s point; Darwin pointed out its vestigial character. 

The lobe, or soft lower part, of the ear generally appears 
at the sixth month of fetal life, is found in no animals 
below apes, and in man has no known use other than sup- 
port for ornament. It is said to be larger in women than 
in men; it may be absent in either sex. 

Our eyes are compound and are made up of the same 
three parts that are found in fishes’ eyes. First, a cluster 
of skin-cells dig in to form the lens; skin grows over this, 
becomes transparent, and forms the cornea. Next, a growth 
from the neural tube reaches out and ends in a cup around 
the lens. This cup becomes the retina; the stalk which 
joins cup with tube, the optic nerve. Cells from the middle 
germ-layer now enter the cup and form the transparent 
matter of the eyeball. The middle layer also supplies the 
protecting coat of the retina. As the lens is modified skin 
structure, it is subject to the horny change of old age. Hence 
“cataract” of the eye; the lens has become covered with a 
scale. 

13 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


The Asiatic’s eye is not oblique. The “slit” appearance 
is due to the low nasal bridge supporting the upper lid; the 
lid thus folds and appears “Mongolian.” This “oblique” 
eye is not uncommon in white children at birth; when the 
bridge develops slowly it may persist for months, even into 
adult life. 

In the inner angle of our eye is a little fold of skin of 
varying size called the plica semilunaris. It is a rudiment 
of the third eyelid or nictitating membrane that cleans the 
eyeballs of birds and frogs; their upper eyelid is immova- 
ble. 

The tears which wash our eyes—otherwise as dirty as our 
faces—come from lachrymal glands in the upper outer 
corner of each eye. Some have additional tear. glands at 
the sides of the eyes, as have reptiles. 

Our skin is a double structure. The outside, or epidermis, 
is ectoderm; the inside, or dermis, is derived from the meso- 
derm. The fetal skin at first is translucent and not unlike 
that of fishes. During the third month, the epidermis begins 
to become horny, as it is in adult life. It is significant that 
if we lose a third of our skin—by fire, acid, boiling liquid, 
or flaying—we lose our life. 

Color of skin is an inherited trait and is due to grains 
of brown or yellow-red pigment in the dermis. Entire ab- 
sence of pigment in skin, hair, and eyes is a developmental 
defect and results in albinos. Albinism is an inherited trait 
and is found in many animals. White blackbirds are as 
common as white black men. Pigment is probably due to 
secretion of an endocrine gland. 

To form a better grasping surface, the skin of man’s, 
monkeys’, and many other mammals’ hands and feet is 
thrown into minute ridges, especially prominent on the finger 
tips. These ridges form loops, spirals, and arches. In no 
two individuals on earth do they make exactly the same 
pattern. Hence their unique importance as marks of iden- 
tification. 

14 


THE LIFE CYCLE AND THE HUMAN RACE 


At the fourth month, the embryo begins to show a fine silky 
hair coat or lanugo (down). This begins to be replaced, 
even before birth, by a second coat of different character. 
The lanugo may persist as “down” on the face of girls and 
women, or even all over the body, as on the so-called dog- 
faced people of the menageries. The lanugo probably rep- 
resents our adult ancestral condition. But no satisfactory 
theory has yet been advanced to account for the fact that 
man is the least hairy of the primates. 

Hair does not grow on our bodies in haphazard fashion, 
but in lines and sets of three, four, or five, each set being 
the hairs that grew beneath one scale of our reptilian ances- 
tors. On certain parts, especially on males in the region 
of the navel, may be detected a vortex pattern like that at 
the end of the spine where the tail once projected. 

Cats “‘feel’’ in the dark with whiskers or vibrisse. Man’s 
eyebrows and mouth and ear hairs seem to be the modified 
descendants of such feelers. Actual vibrisse—long, coarse, 
stiff hairs—often appear in men, especially after middle life, 
generally in the eyebrows, less often on the end of the nose. 

Man’s hairy coat varies individually and in races. Because 
of their hairy bodies, the aborigines of Japan are called the 
Hairy Ainu. The amount of hair on the face and the parts 
of the body covered by hair also vary in different races. 

We inherit finger and toe nails, almost without change, 
from our animal ancestors. The nails of our big toe, thumb, 
and first and second fingers tend to be flat—as they are in 
apes; the arched nails of our other fingers suggest the rounded 
claws of certain mammals and are like the long curved nails 
of monkeys. 

Our skin is rich in glands. These begin to develop during 
the fifth month. The sweat glands reduce temperature and 
eliminate waste. Sebaceous or fat glands lubricate the skin 
and hair, and in certain regions (armpits, for example) 
secrete an odor. Such odoriferous glands are generally sex- 

15 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN ‘BEINGS 


ual in character and are highly developed in hoofed animals. 
In the male musk deer of Central Asia the gland is as big as 
a hen’s egg. Its secretion is the base of certain man-made 
perfumes. Consequently, the musk deer is almost extinct. 

Mammals take their name from their mammae—sweat 
glands peculiarly modified to secrete milk. On the one-month 
human embryo appear two mammary ridges extending from 
armpits to groin. A milk gland develops at the upper end of 
each ridge. The ridge then atrophies and disappears. But 
one individual in every 500 has supernumerary glands— 
three, four, even seven pairs are not unknown. These are 
clearly a reversion to an earlier mammalian condition. In 
one case a large gland developed in the middle of the back. 

At first a depression appears in the center of the gland— 
and so remains in the lowest order of mammals. From the 
bottom of the depression many little bases rise; these, in both 
sexes, come to form the nipple just before or shortly after 
birth. The mamme develop no further until puberty, when, 
in the female, they are stimulated to further growth by the sex 
glands. As their function is food, and as they have been 
known to function in otherwise normal males, they are not 
primary sexual characters. 


6 


Now and then a child is born with a common opening for 
the intestine and the urogenital tract. This common vent is 
called a cloaca (sewer) ; it is the normal condition in fishes, 
amphibians, reptiles, birds, and the lowest order of mammals. 
In man it represents a reversion to an ancestral type which 
did not disappear until marsupials evolved, millions of years 
ago, as the second order of mammals. 

The cloacal condition is normal in the human embryo dur- 
ing the second month; at that time the intestine and urogenital 
ducts end in a common chamber. Not until the tenth week is 

16 


THE LIFE CYCLE AND THE HUMAN RACE 


it possible to distinguish a male from a female fetus. Until 
this time the external and internal anatomy is identical for 
both sexes. 

With the eighth week the cloacal condition ceases and the 
embryo develops into a male or a female. Whether it is to 
become male or female is probably determined when the 
ovum is fertilized. The decisive factor is not known, nor is 
it likely that we shall discover means by which the ovum will 
develop into male or female according to our desire for son 
or daughter. As we shall see later, the sex glands themselves 
presumably secrete a hormone which, carried by the blood, 
causes the marvelous changes whereby the neutral rudimen- 
tary organs develop in one or the other direction. 

The anatomical structure on which these hormones may act 
consists of four parallel tubes at the hind end of the body, 
opening into the cloaca. The outer tubes, or Wolffian ducts, 
will carry the male glands; the inner pair, or Muellerian 
ducts, will become the oviducts, or Fallopian tubes. 

If the embryo is to become a male the inner tubes atrophy; 
the Wolfhian ducts become the vas deferens; the cloaca open- 
ing closes to form the scrotum. If female, the cloaca remains 
open; the oviducts grow together in the lower part to become 
the uterus, the upper becoming the Fallopian tubes; the Wolff- 
ian ducts persist as vestiges in the broad ligament. In the 
male the sex glands descend; in the female they remain within 
the pelvic cavity. The migration of the glands in the male 
is common to most mammals, but only in man, due to his 
upright gait, do the inguinal canals through which they pass 
remain weak spots which may permit the escape of a loop of 
the intestine, causing hernia. 

The significant fact is that the human embryo of eight 
weeks has the makings of a male or a female. It follows that 
neither sex possesses any anatomical parts which are not 
found in homologous parts in the other sex. The beginnings 


of all the parts are present from the start; later they come to 
7 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


differ. By change, by shift in position, and by growth or 
atrophy, the original neutral mechanism becomes male or 
female. 

Most plants and many lower animals are hermaphrodites 
(Hermes-Aphrodite) : the organs of both sexes are combined 
in one individual. Higher in the scale of animal life true 
hermaphrodites disappear. But sometimes in an otherwise 
normal human embryo certain parts fail to complete their 
normal development. The result is an individual anatom- 
ically neither a fully formed male nor a female; such are 
called hermaphrodites. But no human being functions both 
as male and as female. 

While the sex glands or gonads appear at the sixth week, 
they show no structural difference as to their future sex; yet 
the cells within under the microscope are already definitely 
of one or the other sex. If female, the cells are of the ovum 
type, large and rounded; if male, the cells are of the sper- 
mium type, very small, very long, and ending in a fine process, 
or tail. 

The function of the renal organs or kidneys is to preserve a 
certain constancy in the blood stream and to eliminate certain 
noxious elements from the body. To perform this double 
function, three types of kidneys have been evolved. The de- 
veloping human embryo, as well as embryos of other mam- 
mals, rehearses this story, all three types appearing in pre- 
natal life. 

The first renal organ to appear, the head kidney, becomes 
an appendage of the sex glands. The second, or Wolffian 
body, becomes part of the seminiferous duct in the male; in 
the female it remains as the parovarium, a vestige in the 
broad ligament between uterus and pelvic wall—it is often 
prone to disease. Finally, true kidneys develop. These are 
at first furrowed, as they remain in some mammals; later they 
become smooth. Sometimes the furrows persist, reminders of 
earlier days. . 

18 


THE LIFE CYCLE AND THE HUMAN RACE 
7 


The alimentary canal appears first as a closed tube within 
the body. It opens later at each end, the upper opening be- 
coming part of the mouth cavity. Below this opening four 
crevices appear which represent the internal arrangement of 
the fish-like gill-clefts. Below these crevices a single sac-like 
structure appears; this divides, and by further subdivisions 
becomes the right and left lung. From the region of the 
crevices outgrowths of the alimentary canal develop into thy- 
roid, epithyroid, and thymus glands. From the extreme upper 
end of the embryonic canal develops a portion of another im- 
portant gland, the pituitary. The stomach at first is merely 
an enlargement of the canal. Just below the stomach two 
outgrowths of the canal develop into the important glands of 
digestion, pancreas and liver. 

Without further details of fetal development it will be 
worth while to recall certain variations in the systems of 
digestion, respiration, and circulation, which are significant 
in light of our animal ancestors. 

Our dentition is as well adapted for spinach as for beef- 
steak, specialized for neither. Our front, or incisor, teeth 
are only fair cutters; our bicuspids, or premolars, are not 
strong enough to crunch bones; our grinders, or molars, are 
not very good millstones. Our snarling muscle discloses ne 
such canines as the flesh-eaters stab and tear their prey with. 
Our teeth are on the go. A perfect “civilized”’ set is rare. 
In hundreds of skulls I collected in New Guinea there was not 
one imperfect set—all strong, sound, beautifully aligned. 

Man, apes, and Old World monkeys have thirty-two teeth, 
eight on each side of each jaw: two incisors, one canine, two 
bicuspids, three molars. Man’s mammalian ancestor had 
forty-four teeth: three incisors, one canine, three bicuspids, 
four molars. 

Variation rules. Often there is only one incisor, an in- 
herited condition; there may be three incisors. The canine 

19 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


is rarely absent, but it may be a tiny stump; more often it 
is over-developed, disfiguring the face. A third bicuspid is 
not rare. A fourth molar is more rare, but frequent enough 
to be suggestive. The third molar, or wisdom tooth, is a bad 
lot among whites—jaws too short; it comes in at any angle, 
varies in its cusps, often is a mere stump, often never erupts 
at all. 

Most fishes have teeth in the roof of the mouth as well as 
in the jaws proper. They do not occur in “sets,” but are end- 
lessly shed and reproduced. In the fish embryo the dental 
germs appear before the jawbones; in the human embryo also. 
In the infant’s mouth is a ridge with from five to seven pairs 
of cross ridges; they are even more pronounced in the fetus. 
They disappear with age. Apes have ten pairs of these 
ridges. In pigs, they are strong enough to crush food. Their 
presence in man, with an occasional more or less complete: 
third set of teeth, points to fish and reptile days: teeth in the 
roof of the mouth, endlessly replaced. 

Tonsils appear in fetal life as pockets. They shift position 
and develop into prominent bodies. With adult life they be- 
gin to disappear, leaving pockets prone to disease. They 
are not understood and are never alike. 

The cricket’s chirp was the first music on earth, but it was 
instrumental. The first voice was the amphibian’s. Frog, 
bird, cat, dog, and man would be silent without a larynx; 
without the human larynx there could have been no human 
speech or Tower of Babel. Ours is a wonderful larynx; let 
us get such joy as we can from it. Our developing respira- 
tory system suggests fish; in our youth it is a hotbed of infec- 
tion. Our vocal cords are human only in their high develop- 
ment. But we all have the blind pocket between true and 
false cords which served as a resonator and so strengthened 
the roar by which our ancestors frightened their foes and 
called their mates. In man it varies, but is never so deep as 
in the gorilla. 

The vermiform appendix is the worm its name implies, It 

20 


THE LIFE CYCLE AND THE HUMAN RACE 


is a feeble, narrow, tapering blind alley, opening by a small 
mouth into the large intestine. At birth, in size and form it 
is like an ape’s. At puberty it begins to shorten; it is about 
closed in every fourth adult; in every thirtieth adult it is 
closed throughout. It shrivels up with old age. It may be ter, 
times longer in one brother than in another. It is a true 
vestige. It is predisposed to disease; appendicitis is a fash- 
ionable operation. Only apes in captivity develop append- 
icitis. For an appendix that functions we must go to the 
lowest monkeys. 

The liver usually has two lobes—it may have none, it may 
have twelve; it may have two gall-bladders—it may have 
none. 

The abdominal viscera in the human embryo are not human 
in their arrangement. Only later does the mesentery, or sheet 
of membrane connecting the bowel, become attached to the 
back wall of the abdomen and so hold it in place and in per- 
pendicular position. Sometimes the mesentery is found ar- 
ranged as in monkeys. ‘The loosely attached bowel easily 
twists and becomes obstructed. 

There are more than mere structural variations in our food 
canal; there are signs of degeneracy—in teeth, in jaws and 
throat, and in the large intestine. Changed diet does it. To 
digest raw food our ancestors had to chew it. They had strong 
jaws, heavy muscles, sound teeth properly aligned, big throats, 
and a colon that could digest husks of grain and skins of 
fruits and vegetables. 

The lobes of the lungs vary in number and position. Due 
to man’s upright gait, the heart has come to rest on the dia- 
phragm. In monkeys the azygos lobe of the lung lies be- 
tween. In man there is always a remnant, of varying size, of 
this lobe. 

The chief business of the fish heart is to pump blood to the 
gills; of ours, to the body. The human embryo at the bran- 
chial-cleft stage has a tubular heart of four chambers. When 
lungs begin to develop the first chamber becomes part of the 

21 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


auricle, the fourth chamber part of the ventricle. These then 
divide into right and left; the right passes venous blood to the 
placenta, the left receives this blood and sends it to the body. 
The fourth chamber may fail to develop normally; the blood 
passes imperfectly into the pulmonary artery and so is not 
properly oxidized. Sometimes a heart is found with the ves- 
tige of a valve which functions in animals no higher than 
frogs and salamanders. Variations in the blood vessels are 
endless. Even the great artery leading from the heart is sub- 
ject to astonishing variations—all harking back to great 
changes in the circulatory: system since man evolved from a 
water-breathing animal. 

When we recall the branchial-clefts in the neckbend of the 
human fetus—and their fate; also that for ages man’s an- 
cestors derived their oxygen from water through gills and not 
from air through lungs; also that man only recently left the 
trees—we must expect to find great variation in human mouths 
and throats, in the food and air canals below, and in the 
marvelously intricate system which delivers blood to every 
cell in the complex body. 


8 


Suppose it’s twins! One in every hundred births is. Ire- 
land averages higher—one pair for every seventy-two births. 

Twins run in families. A mother who has twins is likely 
to bear more twins. She is called a “repeater.” She prob- 
ably inherits twin capacity—and transmits it. Her anatomy 
is such that twins are possible. That she bears twins only one- 
fifth of the time is probably due to her own internal weak- 
ness. Twins occur also in other mammals that ordinarily 
bear but one individual at a time. Triplets occur once in 
every 7,000 births; quadruplets, only once in every 370,000 
births. 

There are two kinds of twins: twins; identical twins. The 
first type develops independently from two ova that happen 

22 


THE LIFE CYCLE AND THE HUMAN RACE 


to mature at the same time. Each ovum develops its own 
chorion and placenta—though the two placentas may partially 
fuse. They are not true or “identical” twins, merely acci- 
dents as to time of birth. Both may be boys or girls, or 
they may be brother and sister. They vary as brothers and 
sisters of a family normally vary. 

Identical twins are always of the same sex: either both 
boys or both girls. They develop from a single ovum, in the 
same chorion, and receive food and oxygen through the same 
placenta, to which each is attached by its own umbilicus. 

There need be no doubt as to whether twins are just twins 
or identical: if identical, they are always of the same sex 
and there is only one placenta; if there are two placentas, or 
if they are of different sex, they cannot be true twins. 

Sometimes identical twins are so alike that only a string 
around the thumb, or some such device, will enable the mother 
to distinguish one from the other. 

It was formerly held that identical twins, triplets, quad- 
ruplets, etc., resulted from multiple fertilization of one ovum. 
But twins and monsters can be produced artifically in biologic 
laboratories. Fish monsters can be grown from eggs deprived 
of enough oxygen. Monsters of all sorts have been grown by 
separating the young embryo into two or more parts. Perfect 
twins have been grown from the two cells of the dividing 
ovum shaken apart. 

Human twins, triplets, etc., presumably arise from early 
separation of the cells into which the original ovum divided. 
If the division is not complete, the result is twin, triplet, or 
even quadruplet monsters. These may take any conceivable 
form, from twins bound together only at one spot, to a twin 
inside the body of the other. An autopsy recently revealed 
a tiny parasitic twin in an abdominal tumor, carried within 
its twin brother’s body for half a century. He had never 
known of its existence. 

Double monsters may have one head, two bodies; two 
heads, one body; one head, two necks, one chest, two bodies 

23 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


below the diaphragm. One twin may be fully developed; 
attached to its body is an arm or a leg of the other. One twin 
may develop no heart, receiving its blood through its umbili- 
cus; it perishes at birth. 

‘In “Siamese” twins, the embryo divides into two at both 
ends but not in the middle; if they share vital organs, they 
cannot be separated by the knife. The Two-headed Nightin- 
gale, Millie and Christina, had two heads, one body, four 
legs; she (or they) could sing by each head and each head 
could control two or four legs. The famous Scottish Brothers 
—clever musicians and linguists—were one individual below 
the waist, above quite distinct except at the back. 

Single monsters may have no arms or legs; no abdominal 
wall; a brain outside the skull or other malformation of brain, 
skull, or face; a Janus face; a Cyclopean eye. ‘There is no 
end to the range of malformation. 

Other abnormalities are only to be understood in the light 
of man’s ancestry. Part or parts stop growth before normal 
human condition is reached. They point the road man tray- 
eled. Some are not easy to classify: vestiges of ancient days, 
part of our normal heritage; faulty cell division, unfavorable 
environment, faulty implantation, or defective germ-plasm? 
In one unique case the ovum had become implanted clear out- 
side the abdominal cavity, just under the skin over the ab- 
domen. It had begun to develop and was diagnosed as a 
tumor. 

The lower jaw may be deformed; no sharp line between 
face and neck, ears almost meeting in front. Reversion to 
a fish condition? No doubt as to what happened—the first 
gill-arch of the embryo failed to develop. It hardly de- 
velops at all in lowest fishes. 

There may be an extra finger or toe, always outside 
thumb or little finger. Is this an ancestral echo, or did a 
finger-bud divide? The tenth-of-an-inch-long four-weeks-old 
fetus’ limbs begin as tiny buds and soon look like paddles. 
Before the buds appear, the fetus is limbless. Sometimes 

24, 


THE LIFE CYCLE AND THE HUMAN RACE 


the paddles never develop into arms or legs; they remain 
mere flaps. Or, the fingers and toes may remain hidden 
in the flaps. Or, some or all of the fingers or toes may be 
webbed—as they are in the embryo. | 

Rabbits are not “hare-lipped’’; their upper lip is cleft in 
the middle. Our lip begins as three pieces; if they fail to 
join, the cleft is between one or both nostrils and the mouth 
—never in the middle of the lip. A double “hare-lipped” 
man is shark-lipped. 

We can eat and breathe at the same time because our 
mouth is shut off from our nose by the palate or, roof of 
our mouth. Our palate begins as two bones; they join in 
the ninth week of fetal life. Sometimes they do not; result: 
cleft palate, as have frogs, snakes, and birds. 

Cysts or hollow tumors may be found in any part of the 
body. When lined with skin, they are called dermoid. They 
are thought to arise from germ-cells which strayed away 
from the sex-glands. 

Generally, abnormal development is due to disease in 
the uterus or to such faulty attachment of embryo that its 
nourishment is impaired. But ova may develop normally in 
abnormal positions, even outside the uterus. Mothers can- 
not influence their intrauterine growth by “scares,” etc. 
Possibly her blood altered by fever might upset normal de- 
velopment. It is known that tetanus, diphtheria, and typhoid 
toxins and antitoxins can pass from the host into fetal cir- 
culation. It also seems that the germs of typhoid, and 
possibly tuberculosis, may similarly pass from host to fetus. 
But it must be understood that there is no interchange of 
blood between the two, nor any commingling of body fluids 
or nerve tissue. The fetus is a true parasite. 


y 


fn upright gait, balanced skull, and arms free at the sides 
of the body, we differ most from the only animals that ape 
29 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


us. This upright gait is maintained by action of muscle 
on bone. We hang on a bony skeleton, largely levers. We 
move by setting those levers in motion. To put us across 
a hundred yards in ten seconds, the skeleton must be mature. 
If our bones were cartilage we would be wonderful con- 
tortionists, but our upright gait would collapse. 

Our ancestors went on all-fours. In acquiring the up- 
right gait, the axis of the body changed from horizontal to 
perpendicular. This necessitated changes in every bone and 
muscle in the body and a complete overhauling of every- 
thing inside—lungs, circulation, abdominal viscera—every- 
thing. 

Our pelvic girdle is a broad, shallow basin; it supports 
viscera. The keystone of the girdle is the sacrum. It sup- 
ports the backbone and locks the arch behind. The dog’s 
sacrum is long and narrow; ‘ours, broader than it is long. 
The sacrum at birth varies from four to seven vertebre. 
These unite into one bone; but the first, and sometimes the 
second, never unites with the others. 

Above the sacrum is the vertebral column proper: seven 
neck or cervical, twelve thoracic, and five lumbar vertebree 
—twenty-four in all. But there may be six or eight cervical; 
eleven or thirteen thoracic; four to six lumbar, At birth, 
most of us have twelve pairs of ribs; some, only eleven; some, 
thirteen. 

Seven pairs of ribs join our sternum, or breastbone; there 
may be only six, there may be eight. The first pair are 
sometimes mere rudiments. Our floating ribs are not so 
important as when we walked on all fours; they vary in 
number and size. The sternum is less important than for- 
merly; it varies enormously. Two little bones sometimes 
found on its upper border are vestiges of the episternal 
bones of the lowest mammals. 

No man-made column is so delicately adjusted, so slender, 
or so well balanced as our spine. Its sigmoid, or “S”’ curve, 
gives elasticity to our body, grace to our carriage, fine lines 

26 


THE LIFE CYCLE AND THE HUMAN RACE 


to our back, and saves our brain from jar and shock. The 
really human curves develop after birth, especially the lum- 
bar curve in the “small” of our back. The infant cannot 
stand straight up because it has not yet acquired a stand- 
up-straight backbone. 

Our backbone ends in small rounded bones about the 
size of peas. They are the coccyx, skeleton of our tail. 
They may grow fast to the sacrum, and by restricting the 
size of the pelvic opening give trouble in childbirth. The 
orang has only three tail bones; we generally have five. 
Like the apes, we also have vestiges of muscles which once 
moved the tail, blood vessels which nourished it, nerves 
which connected it with the brain. 

There is no tailed race in Africa—as the ancients be- 
lieved. Man withdrew his tail beneath his skin before he 
was really man, but nature now and then forgets to with- 
draw the fetal tail. One adult tail measured ten inches. 
Such tails are usually “soft’”—no tail bones outside the 
body. But a two-inch-long tail with bones, nerves, blood 
vessels, muscles, and hair, is known. Tail or no tail, the 
hair keeps on growing in a whorl as though the tail were 
present. 

The upper-arm bone assumes its human form only after 
birth, when it also begins to twist, as does the femur, to con- 
form to its new position at the side of the body. Above its 
lower articulating surface is a thin and shallow plate, often 
perforated—as in certain monkeys. Sometimes there is a 
hole or foramen at the side; it protects a nerve—as it did in 
our reptilian ancestors ten million years ago. 

Human history may not start with man’s foot, but our 
foot is as human as our hands. Its bones show coming and 
going changes. The big toe is the strongest and is more 
powerful in man than in any ape: it is coming. But most 
of it comes after birth; baby’s big toe is a poor affair. The 
little toe is going. In one individual out of every three it 
has lost a joint. But not on account of tight shoes—they 

27 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


can make corns, but cannot change heredity; the third bone 
of the little toe is as often absent in feet which were never 
shod. 

Our skull is no more human than are the bones of our 
foot or of our pelvis. It is shorter in front, longer at the 
back, better balanced on the spine: adaptations to an up- 
right gait and a larger brain. 

Man has a flat face and a sizable chin when he has short 
jaws. But jaws vary, and long or prognathic jaws change 
the countenance. The roof of our mouth was once longer 
than broad—U-shaped, as in some men and all apes. With 
civilized food, the jaws are shortening; the hard palate 
tends to become elliptical in shape. 

In fetal life we have a pair of intermaxillaries between 
the upper jaw bones. At birth the suture, as skull joints 
are called, between them can barely be seen; by maturity, not 
at all. The suture often persists, obviously atavistic. The 
chin, or mental point of the lower jaw, has nothing to do 
with “mentality.” It is a human trait, but not of all men 
equally. Some have “strong” chins, some next to no chin 
ative lt 

We have two nasal bones. But in some men and all 
monkeys they become one; no real bridge then to the nose. 
Sometimes the bones are small and flat: no bridge at all. 

The brain can grow only as long as the three big sutures of 
the skull remain open. They begin to close at the age of 
forty: the one at the back first; the fore part of the brain 
can keep on growing. In animals the sutures close earlier 
than in man, the front ones first. They may close early in 
man; they may persist till old age. | 

When one or another skull suture closes prematurely, 
curiously shaped heads result. The “boat-shaped” head is 
due to premature closing of the parietal suture. When all 
the sutures close prematurely, the skull becomes solid as 
though a single bone. The brain can grow no more. Idiocy 
results—the “Aztec” people of the circus. | 

28 


THE LIFE CYCLE AND THE HUMAN RACE 


The frontal bone begins as two; shortly after birth they 
have become one, the suture disappears. But the suture 
may persist throughout life. 

Most of us have about 310 muscles on each side of our 
body. They are subject to such variation that Testut, a 
noted French anatomist, required 900 pages to describe 
them. Some of us may have 3 muscles an ape would be 
ashamed to own, hangovers from such a remote past. 

We marvel at the agility of monkeys and are astonished 
at the human quality of their actions. Do we not often 
expect them to smile? The smile never comes: they have 
no muscle to smile with. Even the chimpanzee cannot ex- 
press with its face the emotions we think it should; its 
facial muscles are less perfectly developed, less sharply 
defined, than ours. In monkeys, they are even less differ- 
entiated. 

One-fourth of all our muscles are in our neck and face! 
The human face can light up or cloud over because its 
muscles are attuned for complex action—keyed to the human 
pitch. 

Facial muscles in mammals below man are more simple. 
We look for intelligence in the eyes of a horse, not in the 
expression of its face. When it needs to flick a fly from its 
face or shoulder, it moves a muscle buried in the skin. 
Such a muscle covers many animals like a blanket. 

We all have bits of this skin muscle—some of us more, 
some less, even on the chest and back. Usually we cannot 
twitch it; we send a hand after the fly. We have traces of 
it in our scalp; a few have enough to move the whole scalp. 
Most of us can wrinkle our forehead—and do, when per- 
plexed. Apes use this muscle both in pleasure and to frighten 
enemies. We all have vestiges of the muscles dogs use to 
pull, push, and lift their ears; some can even wriggle them. 

So, while the skin muscle of our face and shoulders tends 
to disappear, the deeper facial muscles show progressive 
variation. They are among our most recent acquisitions. We 

29 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


retain the muscle by which the dog shows its canine tooth: we 
can all snarl. But the muscle by which we smile is not so 
regularly present; the man of gloom may have no risorius. 

Variations in muscles about the nose and mouth, necessary 
for speech, are usually forward-looking; they give the 
“speaking likeness” to man. Often they reveal what the 
mind is trying to hide. Only as we grow in experience can 
we make our face a mask to belie our emotions. This is 
because the face is primarily under the control of the auto- 
nomic nerves; they act of their own sweet will and are by 
nature honest. But by and by our brain learns to get con- 
trol of them; we force our face to wear a smile when our 
heart would bid our eyes to weep. 

The long flat rectus muscles which extend upward from 
our pubes once helped to support our abdomen. In our 
upright gait they are of no great use. Usually they end in 
the fifth, sixth, and seventh ribs; they may end in the fifth; 
they may extend up to the second, as they do in the lowest 
monkeys. 

The small pyramidalis resting on the rectus abdominis 
muscle may be absent on one or on both sides; it may extend 
a third of the way up to the navel, or all the way. The 
kangaroo needs it to support the pouch in which she carries 
her young. Man has carried his young in his arms for ages, 
but the pyramidalis hangs on like a bad habit. The little 
sternalis muscle of the breast knows it has outworn its use- 
fulness; it is found in one of every twenty-five individuals. 

We flex our fingers by delicate muscles beautifully special- 
ized. The long clumsy flexor of our palm was good enough 
for our ancestors; it is not good enough for us. It is absent 
in one man out of every ten. 

Our arms are free; they have not forgotten that they were 
once legs. Of 36 bodies examined, 292 variations were 
found in the arm muscles, 119 in the leg. Our immediate 
ancestors were four-handed, we are two-footed. But when 
baby gets on the floor, it pulls with its fore and pushes with 

39 


THE LIFE CYCLE AND THE HUMAN RACE 


its hind limbs: just as we once crawled up out of water on 
to dry land. 

Palmists rarely read the pad at the outer edge of our 
palm—or know that we have one like it on the sole of our 
foot; both protect deep-lying muscles from injury in walk- 
ing. The palm pad has its own palmar muscle in one man 
out of every ten. It helped to work the pads which pro- 
tected the muscles and tendons beneath. ‘To-day, it is as 
atavistic as the pad itself; we gave up walking on our hands 
about 2,000,000 years ago. As for “lines” of fate and 
marriage, and the “girdle of Venus,” they can all be “read” 
in the hands and feet of monkeys, and to a certain extent in 
a baby’s foot—or in the fetal hands and feet. Palmistry is 
as dead as phrenology. Anyone who can read “character” 
or “mental capacity” from head bumps or palm lines is a 
wizard and should be paid accordingly. 

What does it all mean, this astounding range of varia- 
tion, on which I have barely touched? There they are, by the 
thousands, by unnumbered thousands. Shall we say that © 
they lie, that our levator coccygis never lifted a tail, that our 
curvator coccygis never curved one, and that our aitollens 
auriculam never lifted an ear? Or shall we say that we 
are walking museums of comparative anatomy and try to 
find out whence we came and whither we are going? This is 
certain: there is no fixed, standardized, perfect, or biolog- 
ically ideal human body; there are no two human bodies quite 
alike. Each one of us reeks with evidence that our ancestors 
were not the two-handed, two-footed creatures we are now; 
that they had no talking muscles; that they could not back 
up their talk with a speaking countenance; and that they 
could not balance their heads on their spines. 

Some variations are atavistic or vestigial. Like the buttons 
on our coat cuffs, they no longer function; like parlor 
boarders, they often make trouble. They are hangovers 
from a remote past. They are prone to disease; we should 
be better off without them. Some are retrogressive, weak 

31 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


sisters of our body, functioning in a half-hearted way; we 
could do without them—many of us do. Some are progres- 
sive, a little bit more than human; they point to further 
change in man’s physical structure. 

Taken together, they bridge every gap and make a com- 
plete story. They prove that, while our eyes look forward, 
our body has not forgotten its humble origin—and carries 
some dead wood we were well rid of, such as appendix, tail, 
snarling muscle. Our proneness to hernia and prolapse of 
the uterus is only one of the many proofs that our body is 
not yet perfectly adapted to an upright gait. 


IO 


On the day we are born we have used up only 2 per cent 
of our allotted growth power. We can grow 98 per cent more 
if we are spared. | 

We double our weight the first six months; a calf does it 
in fifty days; a dog, in eight. We increase our weight 200 
per cent in the first year, less than 30 in the second, only 5 
in the fifth. Increase in weight then picks up again and 
continues until the tenth year, to drop back from the eleventh 
to the thirteenth. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth, 
puberty years, it increases again, to 12 per cent. That is 
our last spurt. It drops to 4 per cent during the eighteenth 
year; to | per cent during the twenty-second. 

Stature also increases by spurts. By the time the infant 
can walk, it has grown from twenty to thirty-four inches; 
thereafter, until puberty, it grows between two and three 
inches a year. The thirteenth is the rapid growing year 
for girls, the sixteenth for boys. Between fourteen and 
sixteen the boy increases his stature eight inches. Girls 
usually attain their full stature by twenty, sometimes by 
eighteen; boys by twenty-five. But both may continue growth 
three or four years longer, boys even up to thirty-five. 

The newborn’s brain is already one-fifth its destined weight, 

32 


THE LIFE CYCLE AND THE HUMAN RACE 


about ten ounces; by the second year two-fifths, or as large 
as an adult anthropoid ape’s. Full brain weight comes 
before twenty-five; after that it loses weight, rapidly in old 
age. 

"The body changes proportions during growth. At twenty- 
five years the middle point of stature cuts across the pelvis 
—legs make up half the total length; at birth, only three- 
eighths; of a two-months’ fetus, only one-eighth. Adult man 
cannot easily walk on all-fours; at birth he is better pro- 
portioned for an all-fours gait than a gorilla. 

The two elements in growth are weight and height. Weight 
often continues beyond maturity, long after the body has 
taken on its last cubit. The giant can grow no taller; the 
fat lady knows no limit. 

In prenatal life weight increases by growth, Avision! and 
growth of cells. A bacterium increases its weight by 1,000 
per cent in a few hours; the human embryo at first grows 
at least as fast. Weight after birth increases in the size 
rather than in the number of the cells of the body. 

Stature is determined almost entirely by the skeleton. Only 
skin and a thin layer of fat cover skull and the bones of the 
feet; thin cartilage covers the ends of the leg bones; between 
the vertebre are thin pads of cartilage. Stature growth, 
then, is largely a matter of growth of skull, bodies of verte- 
bre, and especially of the leg bones. 

Bones grow from centers of ossification. Centers for the 
principal bones of the body appear by the end of the second 
month of fetal life; centers for the ends, or epiphyses, appear 
jater—many not until puberty, when the skeleton begins to 
assume its permanent form. 

The number of ossiftcation centers varies in different bones. 
The long bones of the arms and legs have at least three: one 
in the shaft itself and one at each epiphysis. The humerus 
at fifteen years is still in three parts: shaft, two heads; but 
the heads are more closely connected with shaft than at birth. 

33 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


By maturity, the heads are so united with the shaft that it is 
not possible to see where they grew on. 

In general, facial and skull-dome bones are formed from 
membrane—‘‘skin” bones; the other bones begin in cartilage. 
Bone-forming celis multiply by division, absorb lime salts 
from the blood, ossify, and so continue until the cartilage is 
replaced by bone. Increase in length ends when the cartilage 
disappears. In the mature skeleton there can be no further 
growth in stature or in length of arms. If final conversion 
of cartilage to bone is delayed, gigantic stature results; if the 
process is reversed, dwarfs. Only the articulating or joint 
surfaces of mature bones are covered by cartilage. 

Bones increase in girth by additions of bone cells from the 
surrounding membrane. Long bones are hollow. To pre- 
serve their relative proportion of bone wall to cavity, bone 
cells on the inside are destroyed as fast as cells are added to 
the outside. Thus the cavity grows with the bone, the form 
and strength of the bones are preserved. This process keeps 
up until late in life. With old age the bones become thin 
and delicate. 


Il 


Complicated changes take place in acquiring the upright 
gait. A chick can run from its shell; a baby cannot even 
straighten its legs. They bend in at the knees and are drawn 
up at the hips, and are only 60 per cent of head-trunk length. 
By maturity they will be over 100 per cent. As the walking 
days approach, the legs grow fast. Knee and hip joints 
change; the legs can now be straightened out. The soles of 
the feet no longer turnin. The baby at birth can clap its feet 
almost as easily as its hands. 

The spine also changes. It is not solid, but consists of 
twenty-four vertebre with pads of cartilage between. At 
birth a large percentage of the column is cartilage. Power- 
ful muscles develop to hold the spine erect; others, acting on 


THE LIFE CYCLE AND THE HUMAN RACE 


the ribs as levers, to balance the trunk and spine. The last 
five, or lumbar, vertebre at birth make up 27 per cent of 
the total spine length, as in adult chimpanzees; in adults they 
make up 32 per cent. The first two lumbar vertebre take 
on their wedge shape which produces the curve in the small 
of our back only after birth. When the baby first tries to 
stand, it bends backward at the loins. 

Standing is a complex act involving nearly all our big 
muscles. When we stand “at attention,” powerful ligaments 
in the hip joint hold the body. This relieves the muscles from 
strain, but locks the knee joint. We stand easier if the knees 
are slightly bent and the knee-caps loose. 

The feet muscles must bind the many small bones together 
to give support and form the instep or arch. A man can 
stand up asleep, but not if muscles of feet or of legs are 
“asleep.” 

In walking, each leg rests half the time. We tire standing 
because neither leg gets rested. The shoulder muscles which 
hold the head erect also ache from the strain in standing. As 
we nap in a chair the head nods. 

Flat feet are not due to a giving way of ligaments; liga- 
ments limit joint movement. Feet become “flat”? when the 
muscles of the arch fail to support it; the arch breaks down. 
The result is a mid-tarsal joint. This is most likely to happen 
in long, narrow feet. 

Short feet and high insteps go with large calves. To raise 
our body on our toes, we lift our heel. The toes are the 
fulcrum, the power is the calf muscles; the weight falls on 
the foot at the ankle joint but nearest the power at the 
heel. Hence the greater need for large calf muscles. But 
small calves go with long heel bones. As the foot is a 
lever of the second order, the long heel brings the weight 
nearer the fulcrum—that is, the toes. Hence “‘flat-foots’ do 
not step off their toes; the fallen arch destroys the lever of 
the foot. 

We nod our head between skull and first vertebra, or atlas; 

35 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


rotate, between atlas and second vertebra, or axis. Both 
movements are limited by ligaments; otherwise the spinal 
cord would be crushed. 

The main business of the face is to hold the teeth-bearing 
jaws; eyes and nose moved in by accident. The infant’s 
face and neck seem small because the brain is so large. 
Their real growth begins with the eruption of the teeth. 

The skull is a fulcrum for the jaw muscles in chewing. 
Muscles to hold the fulcrum steady develop with the teeth. 
The neck grows larger. With the teeth all in place the 
neck reaches normal size, -the rounded “baby-face” disap- 
pears; strong jaws, powerful muscles, and prominences and 
ridges on bones of face and head support the muscles of 
mastication. The tiny mastoid processes below the infant’s 
ears become adult structures as big as thumbs, required for 
muscle support. 

The first, or milk, teeth should be in place by the end of 
the second year. Meanwhile the transverse ridges in the 
roof of the infant’s mouth disappear. The permanent denti- 
tion begins with the first molars in the seventh year; incisors 
in the eighth and ninth; premolars in the tenth and eleventh; 
canine and second molars in the thirteenth to fourteenth; third 
molars, or wisdom teeth, in the seventeenth to fortieth year. 

Startling changes of far-reaching consequence mark the 
years of adolescence for both sexes. As these changes are 
both physical and mental, and as they proceed under impulses 
from the gonads acting as glands of internal secretion, they 
will be described in the chapter devoted to the endocrine 
organs. 

After maturity the body’s chief task is to maintain its 
equilibrium: produce enough energy and heat to keep up 
repairs and carry on. But, from ovum to death, the body 
never ceases to change. Senility may be postponed; the 
body begins to age the day the ovum begins to grow. Before 
the newborn can mature, it must grow more human. Before 

36 


THE LIFE CYCLE AND THE HUMAN RACE 


it is twenty years old, it will increase its weight from fifteen 
to thirty times. Thereafter it grows old at a less rapid rate. 

Old-age or senile changes precede natural death. These 
appear toward the end of a span of life which varies in differ- 
ent species. This span of life for some invertebrates is less 
than 100 hours; for some insects, 17 years; for some fishes 
and reptiles, over 200 years; for some birds and mammals, 
120 years. 

Absolutely authenticated cases of human beings alive be- 
yond 100 years are almost unknown. It is far from certain 
that Thomas Parr lived 152 years. A critical examination 
of nearly one million cases of alleged unusual longevity 
showed none over 100, and only thirty that lived that long; 
twenty-one were women. 

Longevity is not, as Weismann claimed, related to size of 
body. Some mammals live less than two years, some locusts 
seventeen. A dog is old at 20. I have seen a parrot 117 
years old; it matured in its first year. A tortoise can live 
350 years. No elephant known has exceeded 130 years. 
Nor does death “naturally” follow the reproductive stage; 
innumerable animals long survive their sex life. But every 
animal must reach sex maturity or its kind dies with it. 

Old age is decrepitude; the body is worn out. The mechan- 
ism the infant acquired to walk with breaks down. The spine 
is not so supple, the cartilage disks between vertebre shrink. 
This decreases stature—as.much as three inches after fifty. 
The spine both collapses and “stoops with age.”” The knees 
are bent, the hip joints stiff. The muscles shrink. The body 
loses its natural fat. Folds of skin appear on neck and 
face. The toothless jaws atrophy and the mouth loses its 
shape. Cheeks and temples cave in, the bony scaffold be- 
neath stands out. 

- The brain loses weight—in the last forty years of life as 

much as three ounces. The heart is enlarged from over- 

action to keep the blood coursing through thick, hard arteries. 

The pulse mounts again. It was 134 at birth, 110 at the 
OT 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


end of the first year, 72 at twenty-one. After eighty, it is 80. 
The lungs lose their elasticity, the walls become thicker. | 

Many women after fifty show a thicker neck, hair on the 
face, deeper-toned voice, more prominent cheek-bones, ridges 
over the eyes. Their “feminine” traits are less feminine. It is 
as though the inactivity of the gonads permitted a return to a 
neutral condition, halfway between male and female. 

Old age, senility, decrepitude; the body is worn out, it can 
no longer function. Death. 


12 


There are no two human beings quite alike; every human 
being in the world is unique. And yet there are about seven- 
teen hundred million beings in the world to-day so much 
alike in body and behavior that without hesitation we call 
them human; they all belong to the human race. Nor is 
there any doubt about the striking physical differences be- 
tween a white-skinned, blue-eyed, fair-haired Scandinavian 
and a black-skinned, black-eyed, frizzly-haired Senegambian. 
The Scandinavian and the Senegambian are so different that 
they could not possibly be mistaken one for the other. Do 
they belong to the same race? 

Recently I came across this heading: “Races Now Well 
Defined’’; and here is a sample definition: “Asiatic or Mon- 
golian race—yellowish color, dark hair and brown eyes, 
character cruel and avaricious, fond of show, likes to dress 
in flowing garments, and is ruled by prevailing opinions!” 
This is sheer nonsense. Here is a better one: “Caucasian or 
European race—white skin, red cheeks, brown hair, round 
skull, oval face, smooth forehead, narrow nose, small mouth, 
perpendicular front teeth, face symmetrical; and agreeable.” 
Agreeable race, therefore! 

Most of this confusion dates from Blumenbach’s scheme 
of five races, one for each continent. But as a matter of fact 
no anthropologist knows where “Caucasian” leaves off, where 

38 


THE LIFE CYCLE AND THE HUMAN RACE 


“Mongolian” begins. Boas, our foremost anthropologist, once 
addressed a Japanese in an Indian tongue of the northwest 
coast of America—he thought the Jap a native American! I 
could pick a dozen old women out of Peking, dress their 
hair and put them in beaded buckskin, and defy Congress to 
tell whether they are Arapaho, Manchu, Chinese, or “Mon- 
zol.”’ 

“Race” is a biologic term and has to do with physical 
characters based on blood relationship. The extent to which 
environment may alter the physical features we are born with 
is still an unsolved problem. There is no Aryan or Semitic 
race, because “Aryan” and “Semitic” are linguistic terms and 
refer to peoples who learn to speak an Aryan or Semitic 
dialect. In other words, race is the naked body we are born 
with; language and culture, the duds we learn to wear—often, 
in civilization, with much discomfort. There are varieties 
or types of men on the one hand; on the other, groups, tribes, 
nations, having a common language or a common culture or 
both. To classify people by language or culture is one thing; 
to classify man by physical traits is quite another. 

There are Negroes in America of African ancestry; they 
speak English, are civilized, Christian, American. Trans- 
plant them to Africa: they cannot get rid of their physical 
features; they may forget or retain their English or acquire 
a new tongue—or a half-dozen; they may retain their “civili- 
zation’; they may become Mohammedans and adopt Arabic 
culture; or they may become cannibals and found a slave- 
trading kingdom. 

A man’s great-grandmother may have been Indian, his 
other ancestors mixed Irish, Swedish, Spanish, and Turkish: 
that man is white, Caucasian, Aryan, and may be “Nordic.” 
For “Indian” substitute “Negro”; if any of the Negro shows 
through, he is a Negro! This gives us the emotional element; 
prejudice is at work. Clothes and the barber go far to 
make the man, but prejudice trains the eye to detect signs that 

39 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


would otherwise never be noticed. A Negro of Atlanta is 
often a white north ot Dixie. 

The emotional factor takes it for granted that moral and 
intellectual values inhere in skin color, language, culture, 
and nationality. H. G. Wells’s heart beats faster in nearly 
every chapter of his Outline of History, because he cannot 
. forget that he is Nordic, Aryan, English, British, white, civi-. 
lized. Are these traits innately or necessarily related? 

Assuming, as every biologist does, that man’s ancestor was 
a monkey before he was an ape, is the blond Caucasian a 
“higher” type than the dark Ethiopian? Is one the end, the 
other the beginning, of human evolution? In other words, 
are there higher and lower races? Common sense says “yes.” 
Common sense also said: There are ghosts. Witches turn 
milk blue. Any idiot can see that the earth is flat! 

If I measure by my foot and weigh by my body, I can 
grade the whole human race from myself down to the lowest, 
blackest Pygmy. Man is usually measured and weighed that 
way, and with the same result: “high”; “low.” The “highest” 
are the whitest; the “lowest,” blackest: when the grader is 
white. It is good psychology—self-love is the first law of 
life—but not good biology. Imagine dogs graded from 
“high” to “low” by a Pekinese pug, a Mexican hairless, a 
Scotch collie, an Australian dingo; or pigeons graded by a 
pouter, a carrier, a fantail, a tumbler, a rockdove! 

Color probably has no biologic significance; it may have 
physiologic value. Nowhere in the plant or animal world 
is it a mark of high or low, or of progressive or backward. 
Man’s skin color is partly determined by exposure, mostly 
by an inherited mechanism which regulates pigment. How 
or why this mechanism works, how it arose and why it varies 
as it does in man, we do not know. 

Pigment is probably a waste product of cell metabolism; it 
contains iron; it is possibly a response to living tissue’s need 
for protection from harmful light rays. This does not help 
much. Why are Eskimos brunettes, Icelanders blonds? Why 

40 


THE LIFE CYCLE AND THE HUMAN RACE 


are the Amazon forest natives “red,” those of the Niger 
forests black? : | 

All humans (except albinos) have skin pigment; it is the 
amount that counts. A white skin may turn dark bronze in 
Addison’s disease. White skins develop black moles and 
tumors, and even general melanosis—dark pigment is carried 
by the blood and deposited throughout the body. 

Much is known of man’s anatomy at the dawn of the 
human race; the color of his skin and other details are not 
known. Fossil bones tell a story; they supply “‘links”; they 
may help clothe the skeleton with flesh, but not with skin 
color. 

Our ancestral skin was probably dark. The amount of 
pigment increased in the Negroid type, decreased in the 
Mongoloid. They represent the two extremes. But “high” 
and “low” skin color is as sound biology as grading planets 
by color would be sound astronomy: Venus “highest”’ be- 
cause whitest! 

Kinky wooly hair is found in no apes or monkeys; straight 
black hair is. The kink is the “highest” type, the straight 
black the “‘lowest.”” Where shall we put the red—and the 
tow-heads? 

‘The African’s jaws are heavy: they support a first-class 
set of teeth. The European goes to the dentist to have his 
jaws stretched; high—or merely degenerate? The Negro 
scores with his thick out-turned lips; no men in the world 
have such human lips as the blackest Africans. Thin lips 
are primitive—“low,” apish. Even in the bony ridges above 
the eyes, most Negroes are among the “highest” of man. 
This ridge is extraordinarily developed in the gorilla; also 
among the blacks of Australia. But in the gorilla it is a 
secondary sexual character. It is not found in gorilla 
children, nor at all in gibbons of either sex. 

The earliest human skulls were probably long. Negro 
skulls are long, but not so long as the Eskimo. There are 
round heads in Europe; rounder, in China. There is no 

4l 


" WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


evidence that big brains are innately associated with long or 
with round heads; nor any evidence that extreme artificial 
deformation of infants’ skulls (a widespread custom) 
changes the size of the brain or the capacity for intelligent 
behavior. 

In brain weight, the average of a hundred Europeans would 
slightly exceed the average of a hundred Africans, but 
among the Africans many will be found exceeding the Euro- 
pean average. The two groups overlap; no sharp line can 
be drawn. Nor, after diligent search, has any difference 
been found in brain structure or in convolutions. Intelli- 
gence does not depend on size of skull, nor is a big skull any 
proof of ability. Neanderthal man of fifty thousand years 
ago had a bigger skull than we have; he disappeared. 

The Negro’s lumbar vertebre are of a primitive type; his 
gait is as upright as the European’s. His spine retains 
more of its original suppleness. 

The Negro’s nose is primitive; it would not be so primitive 
if he had less jaw. The more the jaws recede, the more 
prominent the nose. If a low-bridge nose is “low,” the 
“highest” bridge comes from Asia, through the Jews, acquired 
from the Hittites. 

In long arms as compared with leg length, the African is 
more primitive than the European; as he is in his longer 
heel and smaller calves. In size and shape of external ear, 
he is less primitive than the European. 

What is it all about, then? Much of it, convictions; habits 
of mind; prejudices, emotionally reinforced. There are 
dozens, perhaps hundreds, of physical types. Some have 
peculiarly or excessively marked features in one direction, 
some in another. To have diverged from the parent type 
means—simply divergence. We read significance into color 
of skin and other physical traits without knowing the facts 
behind these traits or the causes of change. There is no 
known fact of human anatomy or physiology which implies 

42 





THE LIFE CYCLE AND THE HUMAN RACE 


that capacity for culture or civilization or intelligence inheres 
in this race or that type. 

How about the ‘‘Nordics,” then? How comes it that the 
Anglo-Saxon is at the top of the heap? Is it not because of 
his inherited ability that he rides the wave? The answer is 
to be found in the cultural history of man. What wave did 
the Anglo-Saxon ride in the days of Tut-ankh-Amen, or of 
Cesar, or of William the Conqueror? Are his feet riveted 
to the crest? 

Civilization is young; blood is as old as salt water. Once 
there was no Anglo-Saxon; but there was “civilization.” 
Were there “higher” and “lower” races then? How “low” 
the savage European must have seemed to the Nile Valley 
African, looking north from his pyramid of Cheops! 

Divergence, mixture; in isolated spots more divergence, less 
mixture; and so, sharply defined types—as the- Eskimo. No 
people have a more distinct physical type than they have. I 
know of no skull more specialized or more easily distinguish- 
able in a collection of skulls than an Eskimo’s. They are 
“pure.” Perhaps no people living are purer! No one pre- 
tends that there is an Eskimo race. 

“Pure” types are extreme types. Blue eyes, flaxen hair, 
white skin, is an extreme type. The huge African with kinky 
hair, black skin, thick lips, high smooth brow, hairless body, 
is equally extreme. One is as pure as the other; one is as 
high as the other. 

Huxley classified man by hair; he was too good a zoologist 
to classify cats by hair. Hair is only hair. Its color is one 
thing, due to pigment; its shape is another. Straight hair 
in cross section is round; kinky hair, flattish. There is 
straight black hair, black hair that will not stay straight, and 
curly hair from red to black. 

We know too little yet what environmental change does to 
physical structure, too little of the permanence of types, too 
little of the causes of change of type. We have no classi- 
fication of man based on stature, skin color, hair form, head 

43 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


form, proportions of limbs, etc., so correlated that they fit 
one race and one only. The original divisions of the human 
race are not yet known. Possibly they never will be known; 
possibly there were no grand divisions; possibly only minor 
types developed from time to time. Some of these types 
became extinct or left only traces which, through intermar- 
riage, have become so hopelessly mixed that they can no 
longer be distinguished. 

Nature is not so prejudiced as‘we are. She says that there 
is a human race, that all human beings are of the same 
genus Homo, species sapiens. She draws no color line in the 
human or in any other species. Black and white dogs mix as 
readily as do blacks and whites when the sex impulse is not | 
outlawed, and are equally fertile. 

In biology, fertility is generally regarded as a criterion of 
species. Using “race” as synonymous with “species,” man is 
of one race. Hence the difficulty in distinguishing even sub- 
species, subraces, varieties, and types of men; they overlap. 
The human species has interbred. There are no biologically 
pure varieties and certainly no pure races, except, possibly, 
the Pygmy. 


13 


Open your atlas to a map of the world. Look at the 
Indian Ocean: on the west, Africa; on the north, the three 
great southern peninsulas of Asia; on the east, a chain of 
great islands terminating in Australia. Wherever that Indian 
Ocean touches land, it finds dark-skinned people with strongly 
developed jaws, relatively long arms, and kinky or frizzly 
hair. Call that the Indian Ocean or Negroid division of the 
human race. 

Now look at the Pacific Ocean: on the one side, the two 
Americas; on the other, Asia. (Geographically, Europe is a 
tail to the Asiatic kite.) The aboriginal population of the 
Americas and of Asia north of its southern peninsula was a 

ick 


THE LIFE CYCLE AND THE HUMAN RACE 


light-skinned people with straight hair, relatively short arms, 
and a face without prominent jaws. Call that the Pacific 
Ocean or Mongoloid division. 

This grouping of man into two grand divisions was pro- 
posed by Boas. The scheme has the merit of convenience 
and is based on facts. Almost every shade of skin color can 
be found in India. But the early inhabitants of India were 
black. Their descendants survive to-day on many isolated 
peaks of Central India. They have Negroid faces, dark 
skin, woolly hair. In the Malay Peninsula and the Philippine 
Islands are isolated bands of little blacks or Negritos. The 
blacks have disappeared from Java, and in Sumatra have 
left only a tinge. The natives of Australia are black, as 
-were those of Tasmania. The Melanesian Islands north of 
Australia are, as their name implies, peopled with blacks. 

Negroes did not get their skin pigment from any “mark” 
put on Cain. Bible and biology are silent on Cain’s color. 
Biologically speaking, the white skins of North Europe have 
lost something. When or where they lost their pigment, and 
why they lost more than the Asiatics, we may never know. 
But they have lost enough, in Kroeber’s opinion, to suggest 
that to Boas’s Negroid and Mongoloid divisions a third 
should be added—the Caucasian. 

Kroeber distinguishes four subtypes: Nordic, Alpine, and 
Mediterranean in Europe, and Hindu in Asia. What are 
the facts? In general, skin color deepens and stature dimin- 
ishes in Europe from north to south. North Germans are 
Nordic; South Germans, Alpine. The Alpine is broad- 
headed; the others, long. The Hindu is long-headed and 
dark-skinned, probably due to mixture with the submerged 
aborigines. Otherwise we have not moved a foot. It can 
as easily be shown that between North Europe and India 
there are only three subtypes—or that there are thirty-three. 
You can have as many as you like. To use William James’s 
figure, counting “subtypes” is as profitable as counting the 
stones on a New Hampshire farm. But if any Nordic’s 

45 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


pride is soothed by recognizing a Caucasian division and 
four subtypes, let it be soothed. 

The prevailing color of the Mongoloid type is yellow. 
Malays and American Indians are nearest to the original 
type. The Chinese are a divergent strain; the Eskimo, a 
peculiar subvariety. The Negroid type abounds to-day in 
Africa proper (south of the Sahara) and in Melanesia. 

Millions of Europeans are darker in color than millions 
of Asiatics. The colors overlap along the borders; they 
will intermarry. The border itself is a political boundary, 
not a racial barrier. North Europeans were not always 
as colorless as they are now. Once there was neither Mon- 
goloid nor Negroid. These divisions simply represent direc- 
tions of development, probably begun on two continents— 
Asia, Africa. Some diverged from the main line before 
others; their affiliations cannot be made out. 

For example, the Bushmen and Hottentots of South Africa 
are two distinct Negroid subtypes; yet they are also distinct 
from typical blacks. Both are yellowish in color, have long 
heads, short flat ears, short legs. Are they remnants? Of 
what? 

African Negroes and Melanesians of the South Pacific 
are close kin. The African has a flat nose, the Melanesian 
aquiline. Why is the Fijian black, his nearest neighbor 
yellow? 

The Australian black is a puzzler. In some ways he is 
nearer Caucasian than Negroid. He is short, slender, long- 
headed; has a broad nose, wavy hair. His closest kin are 
the primitive folk of South Asia: Kolarians of India, Veddas 
of Ceylon, Sakai of the Malay Peninsula; the group is often 
called the Indo-Australian. Possibly the Veddas branched 
from the Caucasian type before it lost its pigment and took 
on the European type of face. 

The Negritos, or Pygmies, are even more puzzling. The 
average stature of the human race is five feet five inches. 
Few groups of men vary from this more than two inches. No 

46 


THE LIFE CYCLE AND THE HUMAN RACE 


race averages less than five feet or more than five feet ten 
inches except the Pygmies of equatorial Africa, the Malay 
Peninsula, New Guinea, and the Philippine Islands; they 
are true dwarfs. Their average stature is a full foot short 
of the average of that of man. Many adult Pygmies are 
only four feet; no males exceed five feet. If stature were 
held to be a mark of race, there would be only two races— 
Pygmy; non-Pygmy. 

The Pygmies are as black as blacks; they are dwarfs; other- 
wise they are as human as Nordics. In jaws, lips, and nose, 
they are more Nordic than African; in relative length of arm 
to leg they are almost as close to the Chimpanzee as the true 
Negro. 

The Pygmies are spread around a quarter of. the globe. 
They are so alike in physical type that they constitute a real : 
thorn in unraveling the history of man’s body. They com- 
plicate the general problem of human races; they constitute 
a distinct problem in themselves. Are they remnants, heritors 
of the ape crowd that left the trees for good? Possibly. 
Theirs, perhaps, is the type of body our ancestors tried out 
ages ago. It was good enough to be human and to survive; 
it was not good enough to subdue the earth. 

Two points seem to stand out over and above every dis- 
cussion of races and varieties of man: there are areas of 
characterization—within such areas, especially if isolated 
for long periods, certain physical traits or varieties become 
pronounced; these physical traits or varieties are neither 
necessarily biologically useful nor related to mental capacity 
or intellectual endowment. 


14 


Unless well protected, or in rainless Peru or Egypt, or in 
dry caves, or the cold storage of Arctic ice, or in oil, wax, 
or amber, the body soon yields to the bacteria of decay or to 
the teeth of wolves and hyenas. For bone or other tissue to 

47 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS © 


be replaced by mineral whereby it petrifies or “fossilizes,” 
many conditions must be right. The wiser the animal, the 
less likelihood of its being caught in quicksands or en- 
culfed by the gravel and silt of floods. Primitive man was 
as little enamored as we are of being buried alive. 

Fossil remains of the famous Cré-Magnon man have been 
found in Wales, and especially in France. Possibly earth 
never saw finer built human beings. His brain was 15 per 
cent larger than ours, his stature taller than any living race 
by two inches. He was clean-limbed, lithe, and swift. He 
had a good chin, thick and strong jaws. His head was long, 
his face broad. He buried his dead. He was an artist and 
an artisan. He lived about 25,000 years ago. Did he be- 
come an ordinary European, or did he disappear? No one 
knows. 

Beyond Cré-Magnon, our forbears rather run to brutish 
casts. Grimaldi man was of the Negroid type. Neanderthal 
man had a huge head, chipped flint, and buried his dead. He 
is set down at 50,000 B. C. and left no known heirs. He 
is the first known cave-man. 

The jaw of Heidelberg man fits a gorilla, but the teeth 
are ours. He is possibly 400,000 years old. Piltdown man 
is possibly a hundred thousand years older. Some think he 
was anape. Some say he was the first Englishman. We have 
reached a point in time where no one knows who’s who. 

The champion fossil is Pithecanthropus erectus (ape-man 
erect), discovered by Dubois in Java in 1891. He is cer- 
tainly a half-million years old; some say a million. He is 
more pithecoid than any known human being, more anthro- 
poid than any known ape. He was as erect and almost as 
tall as the average European. He had definitely left the 
“well-ventilated arboreal tenements.”’ He was a low-browed 
moron—and may be represented in the living flesh. But 
whether he was of the direct line that led to man, or only of 
a line that ended with himself, is not yet definitely known. 
It is enormously significant that, after a debate lasting more 

43 


THE LIFE CYCLE AND THE HUMAN RACE 


than a quarter of a century, the biologists of the world can- 
not decide whether Pithecanthropus erectus belongs to the 
first or the second of the earth’s First Families. That makes 
him a pretty good link that is no longer missing. 


IS 


There are six families of Primates, premier order of 
mammals: 1. Lemuridae (lemurs); 2. Hapalidae (marmo- 
sets); 3. Cebidae (monkeys); 4. Cercopithecidae (baboons, 
monkeys, etc. ); 5. Simiidae (manlike apes); 6. Hominidae 
(men). 

To import monkeys for their sex glands is ghastly busi- 
ness, perhaps the lowest that has engaged the cupidity and 
lust of man, but to shoot down simians as we do mad dogs or 
boys in uniform is a crime. The four Anthropoid apes are 
our next-of-kin-living; they should be respected as ccusins 
and not exterminated as vermin or Indians. 

Man never was a gorilla, a chimpanzee, an orang, or a 
gibbon. No biologist ever made such a claim. Whether these 
apes could have developed into human beings is a different 
story. They have the makings—all the parts. If we knew 
how heredity works and could control variation, we might 
breed from an ape a being that could dig a ditch, play the 
piano, talk English, and sing the “Messiah.” We can teach 
them to smoke cigarettes, chew tobacco, drink beer, wear 
clothes, and eat with a knife and fork. We do not yet 
know the limit of their capacity to learn human ways. 

Why do zodlogists put these four apes so close behind us 
that we can feel their breath and they can catch our dis- 
eases? Because they are Anthropoid. Nothing has yet sur- 
passed them in the race to become human. Their anatomy, em- 
bryology, histology, morphology, paleontology, physiology, 
and psychology entitle them to second place in the Ancient 
and Honorable Order of Firsts. 

They vary in their man-likeness; no one is in all ways 

49 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


closest to man. The orang looks like an Irishman; the gorilla 
is built like Jack Dempsey; the chimpanzee is the most 
angelic; the delicate gibbon has a lady-like skull and an up- 
right carriage. The first three—the Great Apes—are the 
extremes of variation from a generalized ancestor. The 
gibbon varies least, and to that extent is nearest the tree 
man climbed down when he decided to stand up and talk. 

Except in teeth, the young female gorilla is the most 
human. Her father is a brute in size and appearance. Only 
five feet high, he may weigh over 400 pounds: mostly neck, 
chest, and arms. If his legs were of human proportions, he 
would stand over seven feet high. His hands and feet are 
almost man’s. His courage is unbounded, his strength pro- 
digious. His humanoid skull has retreated behind enormous 
jaws and beneath powerful ridges required to support the 
muscles to work the jaws. He is the blackest Anthropoid; his 
skin is nearly black; his hair is coarse dark brown, whiténing 
with age. 

The chimpanzee, like the gorilla, lives in jungle Africa. 
Like the gorilla, he has a shuffle-along gait, swinging his 
body between his long crutch-like arms. He has the gorilla’s 
proportions, but never the great bulk of chest. And so is 
more at home in the trees, where he builds his nest, as does 
the orang. The chimpanzee’s skull is not unlike the one ape- 
man erect tried on when turning into man—and gave up 
because it had too much jaw for the teeth required and not 
enough brain-box for ideas. 

Our other two cousins are Asiatics. The larger is that red- 
headed satire on the human race, the Wild Man of Borneo 
and Sumatra; known to the natives as orang-utan, to science 
as Simia satyrus. The orang is the original roundhead. He 
is chunky, rather lazy, but has a good mind. He moves into 
a new nest when he has eaten up all the figs and young leaves 
in the neighborhood of the old one. With his four-foot body 
and his seven-and-a-half-foot arm-spread, he can swing 

50 


THE LIFE CYCLE AND THE HUMAN RACE 


through the forest faster than a man can run. He slows up 
on the ground, where he is less at home. 

The gibbon (Hylobates) is the prima donna of the Anthro- 
poids. If our weightiest opera star could sing as loud in 
proportion to size of body as can the slender three-foot-high 
gibbon, she could drown the siren of the Leviathan. 

There are several varieties of gibbon, marked chiefly by 
hair and skin color. None is so dark as the African apes. 
With arms relatively longer even than the orang’s, they swing 
across the forests of south-eastern Asia with amazing skill and 
rapidity. For hours on end they clear fifteen-foot spaces; 
as much as forty feet when in a hurry. 

In shape of skull and character of teeth the gibbon is the 
most primitive ape, and thereby the most humanoid and 
nearest the source of man’s origin. He walks erect, his 
arms are free and straight, his brain-centers for touch and 
hearing are humanoid. In other words, of our four first 
cousins the gibbon has the closest speaking likeness to our 
great-grandfather. 

The Cercopithecidae share with man and man-like apes the. 
doubtful honor of having thirty-two teeth, a narrow nose, a 
tail more ornamental than useful, and a thumb which can 
describe a circle. Their big toe is equally opposable, a 
trait we generally leave in the cradle. They have no vermi- 
form appendix; as compensation, they have callused rumps. 
These, in mandrills, together with the cheeks, are gorgeously 
colored; rarely are more brilliant blues, ee and scarlets 
found in nature. 

The baboon is named Cynocephalus from his dog-like head. 
He walks on all-fours, has long since abandoned tree life, 
and is so strong and savage that he easily holds his own on 
the ground. He has the meanest disposition, and, in spite of 
fine fur, painted cheeks, and brilliant bottom, is the least 
prepossessing of the Primates. 

The macaques, of which the Barbary ape of Gibraltar is 
the only Primate but man living in Europe in historic times, 

ol 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


are mostly Asiatic. One species lived in Japan, and is 
preserved in inimitable art. In fact, never did contact be- 
tween two First Families lead to such happy results as when 
they posed for Japanese artists. 

The two American First Families (2 and 3) are just 
monkeys. They have broad flat noses, no cheek pouches or 
callused rumps, tails generally prehensile, and a thumb often 
tiny and never opposable. 

The tiny marmosets are greatly prized by sailors, and, since 
the opening of the Panama Canal, many spend their last 
days aboard a warship. They have the same number of 
teeth a sailor ought to have. 

The Cebidae include all other New World monkeys. They 
have thirty-six teeth, humanoid nails—flat, instead of claws— 
and a tail as good as a fifth hand. The best known Cebida 
is the capuchin, named from its monkish garb—often dis- 
guised by the rags of his bondage to an Italian organ-grinder. 
This contact between First Families may please the children, 
but has not led to art. Probably a capuchin is no happier 
_on the East Side than is a marmoset on a flagship. Yet the 
tiny marmoset has the brain of man at the third month of 
fetal life. 

The lemurs are our poorest relations—poorest in all that 
makes for kinship between man and monkey. They live in 
the trees, prowl around all night, sleep all day. Their body 
resembles that of a four-footed animal. Their brain also 
is of low type; the hemispheres of the fore brain are small 
and do not cover the hind brain. Their second toe is a claw, 
often weirdly long. 

It is a far cry from man to lemurs, but the links yet 
missing are not between man and the great apes, but between 
the great apes and the gibbon and between the gibbon and 
monkeys. In one sense the great apes are halfway between 
man and gibbon, yet the gibbon is much closer to the three 
than to monkeys. It is also related in many ways to the 
New World monkeys. Hence it is likely that gibbon, Old 

o2 


THE LIFE CYCLE AND THE HUMAN RACE 


World monkeys, and New World monkeys all came from a 
common stock. The New World monkeys developed in one 
direction, the Old World monkeys in another. But while 
the gibbon preserved and perfected its purely arboreal 
mechanism, it also developed an upright posture and, when 
on the ground, an upright gait. Orang, chimpanzee, and 
gorilla also specialized, each in its own way. The gorilla 
evolved the largest brain, but only larger than chimpanzee’s 
as its body is larger. 

The gibbon, in common with the great apes, can be inocu- 
lated with infectious diseases: syphilis, for example. Such 
inoculation in monkeys leads only to slight disturbance. 
Monkeys do not respond to the test for human blood, nor 
do any other mammals except the four Anthropoids. 

The common ancestral stock of man and Anthropoids de- 
veloped in two directions: the gibbon remained small; the 
others became heavy and partly took to the earth. Man 
came from that group and left the trees altogether. But 
even as he turned in our direction, his equipment was in- 
valuable. His long sojourn in the tree-tops and his agility 
in swinging through the forest were a great education, for, 
as Lull says, “every hand-leap required that he instantly 
solve a compound problem in mathematics made up of dis- 
tance, trajectory, direction, and strength of limb.” When 
he did not solve that problem, he crashed! Mental prepared- 
ness had a high premium in those days. | 

We often wonder where we get our brain; it was stand- 
ardized a million years ago. From stock such as the gibbon, 
man also sprang. That life in the trees gave him his start 
toward his big brain. There was no “fall’’; man climbed 
down. And that is a story of changing limbs. 


16 


There is nothing in man’s arm, from the muscles by which 
it is fastened to his head, neck, and spine, to his finger nails, 
o3 | 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


that does not show modification due to change in function 
since man left the trees. The gibbon line started the changes. 
He can stand as straight as man; his shoulders have already 
swung around to the side of his body, his thorax begins to 
assume the human type. 

Our ancestor needed a long forearm and a short upper 
arm. In swinging through the trees the body, attached to 
the lever at the shoulder, is the weight; the fulcrum is in the 
elbow; the biceps muscle furnishes the power to the moving 
lever or upper arm. The greater the distance of this lever 
from the fulcrum, the greater the power. The biceps muscle 
in the gibbon has extra heads of insertion, the better to lift the 
greater weight. 

Our ancestral arm became modified to meet a change in oc- 
cupation. With hand work, the movable lever was no longer 
the upper but the forearm. Men vary greatly in relative 
length of upper to forearm, but in general our forearm is 
short and powerful. We do not need the extra heads of inser- 
tion for our biceps, but one man in ten still has them. 

Why did not man fly down? That. would have been 
speedier. In a pinch he could fly up again. To fly is to be 
free. Bats can fly. They are high mammals; they are marvel- 
ously free. But at what a price! They lost their hands. They 
cannot handle things. A baby can; does. That handling of 
things is a priceless possession, worth more than eagle’s 
wings. With hands the baby brings things up to its eyes, 
ears, nose, mouth; turns things over, examines them from 
all sides; prods things to see if they are alive; shakes them 
to learn if they are hollow; feels them to find out if they 
are ripe or rotten or hard or smooth or hot; feels its own 
body, explores itself. 

The monkey is no less handy, rather more so; and mar- 
velously quick. The hand of a baboon in a Calcutta zoo shot 
over a high wire screen and picked my spectacles from my 
eyes; I knew he had them only when I saw them in his hands. 
He twisted the wires into a shapeless mess and broke the 

o4 





THE LIFE CYCLE AND THE HUMAN RACE 


lenses into tiny bits; nor gave me revenge by cutting his 
fingers. 

It is enormously significant that a normal newborn can 
hang by its hands for half a minute; three weeks later, for 
two or possibly three minutes. Not so much? Try it. An 
average three-weeks-old baby can outhang an average thirty- 
year-old parent. It is a doting father that encourages baby 
to get its fingers in his beard; it “hangs on for dear life.” 
So it does. It had to, once, or fall. That was the way it 
clung to home and mother up a tree. 

Primitive peoples to-day walk up and down trees, “like 
a monkey.” Some tribes make their homes in trees. Arm- 
less men can learn to write and shave with their toes. 

When a boy drops from a limb, his legs bend out at the 
knee and hip joints. When he falls, he generally breaks 
something. The legs and feet of a newborn babe are no 
good at all for walking on a flat surface. The legs are 
crooked, the feet turn in. When it can walk, it does not 
walk on the soles of its feet, but on the outer rim of the 
soles. The bones under that outer rim are the first to appear 
in fetal life. The baby can wriggle its big toe almost as 
much as its thumb. Its drawn-up crooked leg, inturned foot, 
and opposable toe are lingering mementoes of the days when 
our feet were more at home on the limb of a tree than on 
the ground. Our hand is very wonderful, but not so “human” 
as our foot. 

Even our ancestral backbone was almost human. It was 
not arched, as is the dog’s; it was already a column. Not 
for months can the baby stand up, but it can soon sit up. 
Man sat up on a limb before he stood up on the earth. If we 
must “point with pride” to some part of our anatomy denied 
our monkey ancestor, it is not to our spine or to our hand, but 
to our foot. To become human, the foot had to travel as 
far as our brain. Yet we hide it in a shoe made on the 
toe formula of a spider monkey. Our longest toe is our 
big toe; if not, our foot is a throw-back and a poor relatior. 

ys) 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


The human foot at best is a misfit and is not improved by 
being shod. By the time we have lost our lower jaw through 
disuse, we shall have lost all our toes but the big one. Our 
foot will then be as highly specialized as a horse’s. Of all the 
Primates, man’s foot is the most primitive; next is the go- 
rilla’s. Even Pithecanthropus is allowed a human foot be- 
cause his thigh bone was so human. He walked like a man 
—and as man cannot at birth. 

The great apes’ babies also have short and crooked legs, 
and, like man babies, but unlike monkey babies, cannot 
hang on to their mothers by their fingers and toes. Their 
fingers are only fair graspers and their toes worse; their 
mothers’ bodies have not enough hair to hang on to. They 
must be carried. On that fact rests the foundation of every 
human home. ‘The first kindergarten of human conduct was 
in the trees. 

A monkey baby clings to the hair of its mother’s body by 
its fingers and toes. Lemur babies wrap their legs around 
their mother’s body, cling with their arms, and anchor them- 
selves by holding on with their mouth to one of the two extra 
teats in her loins. 

Our ancestor neither fell nor dropped from the ancestral 
tree. He walked down; his brain had become too big for 
foliage. It was the most important step in the life of the 
human race. His début as a terrestrial mammal, with noth- 
ing but his wits as his principal weapon, was the culminating 
episode in the drama of life on this planet. It was ages be- 
Tore he became a good actor, but without his schooling in 
the trees he could hardly have become human in a million 
years. 


17 


Man lost his tail and began to acquire his present stature 
and upright gait, including a tendency to hernia, during an 
56 


THE LIFE CYCLE AND THE HUMAN RACE 


arboreal existence in the Miocene epoch of the Tertiary era 
from two to three million years ago. During the last million 
years there has been little change in his stature or size of 
body. In weight and length of trunk and head, the chim- 
panzee is as human as we are. ‘The greatest change was 
in larger head, shorter jaws, shorter body and arms, longer 
legs. 

During the Miocene, New World monkeys became differ- 
entiated from lemurs and from the tailed monkeys of the 
Old World. Small tailless apes not unlike the gibbon had 
evolved from the Old World monkeys. This was a big step 
in man’s journey up off his belly. Through the ancestor of 
modern gibbons, man lost his tail and gained his gait. 

Dryopithecus, first of the big-bodied apes which eventually 
led to man, also appeared during the Miocene. He is a pre- 
Homo. His line is quite as important as that of Charlemagne 
or the Mayflower. It divided. One branch is represented 
by the extinct Paleopithecus of India and the modern great 
apes. The other branch took to the earth; from it came 
Pithecanthropus, Piltdown, and Heidelberg man. But a mil- 
lion years elapsed before any ape became so human that he 
could only be Homo. 

Was it speech that made man? Speech often leads to his 
downfall, and in all the world is no mechanism so delicately 
poised as a woman’s tongue. But vocal cords are as old as 
frogs; and few of us can chatter like a magpie or a monkey. 
Nor can we howl like a howler-monkey or scream like a 
gibbon. Fossil men left no voices, nor anything to suggest 
the nature of their larynx. Yet it is significant that the 
normal human larynx has no such laryngeal pouch reso- 
nators as have many Primates. Man has had to make an 
amplifier. But no ape has developed speech into such a 
perfect medium of communication as man. This is not 
alone due to any imperfection in voice mechanism. 

Was man’s appearance due to his big brain? The brain 

o¢ 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


- weight of a tuna fish compared to its body weight is as 1 to 
37,000; of an ostrich, 1 to 1,200; of a horse, 1 to 500; of a 
frog, 1 to 170; of a gorilla, 1 to 120; of a lemur, 1 to 40; of 
man, 1 to 35. But brain weight to body weight in rat and 
_magpie is as 1 to 28; in marmoset, 1 to 22; in capuchin, 1 
to 13. The place of honor goes to the humming-bird, 1 to 12. 

Imagine a human being with a brain as large in proportion 
to his body as has a humming-bird! 

But in weight of brain in proportion to weight of spinal 
cord, man exceeds all creation: 50 to 1; in the gorilla, it is 
20 to 1; in mammals below Primates, 5 to 1; in birds, be- 
tween 10 and 2 to 1; in fishes, 1 to 1. Spinal cord is good, 
but brains are brains. And there is nothing in the world 
like them. 

Longevity among Primates began with the great apes. If 
adolescence ends with a full set of teeth, adult life in man 
begins at twenty-two, in the great apes at fourteen. Keith 
holds that man’s age at sixty-six is equivalent to that of the 
gibbon at eighteen, of the great apes at forty-two; and that 
a native Australian of forty-two shows the age changes of 
a European of sixty-two. 

There are no marked sexual differences among gibbons; 
as a rule, the female is a bit heavier. In the chimpanzee, 
sexual differences are about the same as in man. Orangs 
and gorillas show marked differences, the gorilla especially. 
The male is larger, heavier, stronger; his jaws and teeth, es- 
pecially the canines, are more powerful. He is the fighter. 

Secondary sexual characters in man thus appear to be 
only one or two million years old. They seem to be dimin- 
ishing. Nature gets rid of useless structures or finds new 
functions for them. Modern woman shows no great disposi- 
tion to find any new function for them. 

Kurope or Asia? Hrdlicka says Europe—through Pilt- 
down man to Dryopithecus, the Miocene ape. Osborn says 
Asia: “Asia is near a center of evolution of a higher Primate; 
there we may look for the ancestors not only of prehuman 

O38 


THE LIFE CYCLE AND THE HUMAN RACE 


stages like the Pithecanthropus, but of higher and truly 
human types.” 

In that case, prehistoric man in Europe was an immigrant 
from Asia, as was prehistoric man in America. Possibly 
Asia, in a not too remote age, will lead the race to be more 
humane. 


a9 


CHAPTER II 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH, LIFE, AND SEX 


1. Life’s Genealogic Time-table. 2. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. 
3. Experiments in Brains. 4. New Styles in Eggs and Incubators. 5. Our 
Indebtedness to Fish. 6. Back to the Lifeless Earth. 7. The Start from the 
Sun. 8. The L M N’s of Nature. 9. The Fitness of Water and Carbon 
Dioxide. 10. The Evolution of the Organic. JJ. Darwin and Natural 
Selection. J2. Lamarck and Acquired Characters. 13. The Nature and 
Evolution of Sex. 14. The Colored Bodies of the Egg. 15. The Great Game 
of Heredity. 16. Eugenics, or Being Well Bred. 


I 

THE race to be human began with the first living being. 
That being was possible because the earth brought from the 
sun some very remarkable elements and because the sun 
continued to shine. Under its beneficent rays, certain ele- 
ments became so dynamically constituted that they began to 
perform like an organic individual. It could do what matter 
had not done before, behave like a living being. It grew, 
but its size was limited by its nature, as is that of a raindrop 
or a drop of oil or a piece of jelly. It split up. It developed 
new ways of growth, and evolved sex. Various theories have 
been proposed as to how all this came about; even propa- 
ganda for taking the future of the race in our own hands. 
These are to be our concern in this chapter. A time-table 
of life will start us off. With that before us, we can soon 
trace our body back to a bacterium or something just as 
good. It is a long journey, but we shall try to keep out of 
blind alleys from which there is no return. Meanwhile, do 
uot forget that the egg with which we begin life has been 
living since life began; that egg has had a long history and 

66 


THE GEOLOGIC TIME-TABLE OF ANIMAL LIFE 


(Modified from Organic Evolution, by Richard Swan Lull, 1921, 
by permission of the author and the publishers, ‘The Macmillan 


Company.) 


Epoch or 


Era Period 


Psychozoic 
Age of Man 


(Ice Age) 
Pleistocene 


Recent 


; Pliocene 
Cenozoic 


Age of 


Siscuniaills Oligocene 


Eocene 


Mesozoic ‘Cretaceous 
Age of | Jurassic 
Rene. = 


Triassic 


Carbonifer- 
ous 


Paleozoic 
Age of 
Fishes 


Silurian 


Ordovician 


Cambrian 


Proterozoic 


Archeozoic 


Devonian 


Advances 
Civilization 


End of great mammals 


Man-ape became Man 


Miocene |Culmination of mammals 


Higher mammals 


End of archaic mam- 


mals 
Archaic mammals 


End of great reptiles 


Birds 


Dinosaurs 


End of ancient life 
Land vertebrates 
Primitive reptiles 

Ancient sharks 
Amphibians 
Lung fishes 
Armored fishes 

Shellfish 


First invertebrates 


Unicellular life 


9,000,000 


Years’ 


Duration 


25,000 


(Matthew) 


60,000,000 
(Barrell) 


40,000,000 
(Matthew) 


160,000,000 


(Barrell) 


30,000,000 
(Schuchert) 


700,000,000 
(Barrell) 


200,000,000 


to 
1,000,000,000 
(Barrell) 





WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


has learned much about life. Otherwise we could not learn 
to behave like human beings in so short a time. 

Our most human parts—brain, skull, teeth, voice organs, 
upright gait, and fingers—are not new, they are not unique, 
they are not ours exclusively; for life itself they are not 
even essential. Some human beings never use their brains, 
their skull is merely a frame for features, they lose all their 
teeth, and their fingers are all thumbs. No, our most human- 
oid parts will not give us much clue to the nature of the 
ceaselessly changing creature that became at last human. 

A man, monkey, opossum, lizard, frog, shark, flea, fish- 
worm, oyster, and malaria germ have one thing in common: 
they must eat and breathe, or die. Every animal must have 
lungs and stomach, or the equivalent. Call it viscera. Viscera 
are vitals, the something without which there is no living 
animal. What else have they in common? A motor mechan- 
ism to bring the necessary elements of life within reach of 
the living body’s vitals. 

The great difference between man and oyster is not viscera, 
but motor mechanism. That difference is so great that man 
can catch the oyster and eat it. The most the oyster could 
catch of man is a finger, and then only if man carries his 
finger to the oyster and invites the oyster to catch it. Even 
then the oyster could not eat the finger. The motor mechan- 
ism of man and higher animals is knit together by a nervous 
system, supplemented by vocal organs and presided over by 
a brain. 

The history of our body is primarily that of the mechanism 
for getting food, ways of avoiding being eaten as food, and 
method of growth. In other words, the chemical activities 
whereby living beings maintain life are fundamentally the 
same in all animals, but the laboratory in which these activ- 
ities take place and the mechanisms for carrying the labora- 
tory about and for acquiring information as to food, enemies, 
etc., vary enormously. 

Even our Primate ancestor up a tree lacked no parts to 

62 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH, LIFE, AND SEX 


become human; certain parts merely had to be altered. Say, 
two million years. Beyond these two, other millions passed 
while body and brain bided their time; the earth was not 
yet quite ready for nature’s great experiment. 

As Bergson puts it: “Man only realized himself by aban- 
doning a part of himself on the way; he was not yet ready 
to fight for his life with his mere wits.” Wits are his greatest 
weapon. 

We must not think of our body as the most or the best this 
or that. In many ways the eagle has a more specialized struc- 
ture; it excels in eyesight, respiratory system, skeleton, and 
locomotion. Even the bee in its own line, as Thomson says, 
is hardly inferior to man and represents an achievement that 
angels might desire to look into. | 

Life has tried out countless bodies. Certain species of 
snails and crustacea have survived almost unchanged from 
pre-Cambrian days, sixty million years ago. Two-million- 
year-old fossil ants embalmed in amber are so much like 
ants of to-day that, could they awake from their sleep, they 
could recognize their descendants, if their noses were not 
stopped up. They kept to the middle of the road. That 
man evolved from a lowly Primate means that the Primate 
itself was neither an accident nor a highbrow, that it was 
not too far removed from the body its ancestor brought up 
out of the mud on to the dry land. 

Many families of Nature’s masterpieces have no living 
representative because they over-specialized; they gave up 
so much to tusk, trunk, canine, wing, leg, stomach, size, 
height, length, or armor, that they had not enough to live 
on. They put all their eggs in one basket. Earth’s crust 
is full of these fancy forms, so specialized they could not 
meet change. Man got ahead because he could grasp an 
idea, could talk it over with his fellow-men and think up 
new ideas. The amazing thing is not that he became human, 
but that he can be so inhuman in so many ways. 

The fundamentals of living remained unchanged through 

63 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


vast periods of time, the structure in which vital processes 
functioned kept changing. When the larder shifted or the 
nature of its contents changed, the method of keeping the 
viscera in touch with the larder, or in preparing food so that 
the viscera could digest it, had to change. Countless animals — 
still solve the problems of life with simple structures. Few 
went in for brains.. None but man ever tried to discover the 
nature of brains or thought of preserving them in alcohol. 
He could do this because the body he inherited could be 
adapted to diverse occupations. 

Reading the time-table backward suggests a parallel proc- 
ess which seems to have been at work in human culture: 
progress by leaps; between, long pauses. The pauses grow 
shorter as time moves on. 

For a hundred thousand years man gets along without 
steam-control. The steam engine is invented. In the twink- 
ling of an eye steamships plow the seas and every land is 
ribbed with shining rails. The Age of Steam blossomed 
out of nothing. Gossip formerly passed from mouth to ear; 
at breakfast, now, Cape Town reads of the color of the hair 
of the girl the Prince of Wales danced with the night before 
on Long Island. This is another New Age. 

How did man get along without radio, newspaper, steel, 
steam, plumbing, arch, calendar, spear, flint knife, fire? He 
did. But he gets along faster with them. So with life itself. 
It got along without mammary glands and internal incubators, 
skull and vertebral column, head and tail, brains. But with 
brains, head, backbone, and placenta, the procession speeded 
up, life shot out in new directions. 

Progress is often made by lying low; let the other fellow 
try out Nature’s new-fangled notions. By holding out, man 
came on the stage during the big scene. When the call went 
forth for clever people who could double, shifty people who 
could walk back to town if the show “blew,” who could catch 
and fry their own fish in case of need, who could dig out, 
swim across, climb up and jump dowr., who were handy 

64 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH, LIFE, AND SEX 


with their hands, had good memories and could mix, man 
appeared. 

All this took brains: a big brain, a brain so big it had to 
wrinkle or burst its case; a brain with frontal lobes so big 
they dwarf the hind-brain. A brain big in every way; in 
absolute size and weight, in proportion to spinal cord, in 
proportion to body. 

Think of a jellyfish, a shark, or an elephant with a human 
brain. The jellyfish has no head to put it in; the shark, no 
bony skull to protect it; the elephant, no hands to do its 
bidding. The human brain would be an incumbrance to the 
jellyfish, a nuisance to the shark, and would drive the elephant 
crazy. 

Nature has made many extraordinary experiments. Some 
survive: their parts had “survival”? value; most of them dis- 
appeared. But no great group-experiment was a total failure. 
Even the Cyclops-eyed reptile of pre-Tertiary times survives 
in the Sphenodon of New Zealand. ‘The eye itself, as eye, 
was a failure; we inherit it as endocrine gland! 


2 
If the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the 


world, it will not hurt good government if the hand knows 
what it rocks; or what the hand came from; or that the first 
cradle was in a tree-top. The human brain and throat made 
civilization possible, but it was the hand that built the home, 
kindled the fire, and made human culture. There are simpler 
and surer feet than man’s, but none has carried such price- 
less freight or been shod with the wings of a Perseus. The 
human hand should build a monument to the human foot, for 
the foot freed the hand! 

In a class on Christian Evidences, the President of the 
college wiggled his thumb and said, triumphantly, “No 
monkey ever lived that could do that!”’ Could if it wanted 
to. Watch a monkey climb a rope: thumb on one side, fingers 

65 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


on the other. Sally, the chimpanzee, grasps the neck of a 
bottle like a man, and opens a clam shell with the thumbs of 
her two hands. Watch a monkey on a still hunt through the 
hair of its mate. 

Opposability of thumb is no marvel. The marvel is that 
an organ modified for grasping limbs can also pick up a 
pin, throw a stone, wring a chicken’s neck, and crack a nut 
with a rock. Any average monkey has a pair of such marvels. 
The fact is that if a primitive five-toed foot had not been 
carried into a tree and there developed along lines of its 
original pattern, there would be no human hand to grasp 
to-day. It was figuratively and literally kept in the air. 
Had it specialized either as grasper or as support, it could 
not have been turned into the marvelous organ that it is. 

The monkey was not the only mammal that took to trees; 
the whole marsupial family started their career there. The 
kangaroo came down; his prehensile forefoot lost its offset 
great toe. The koala remained; his forefoot developed an 
opposable thumb and an opposable first finger. No vine is 
a better clinger. When you shoot a koala you climb the 
tree and pry its fingers loose or it will hang there till it rots. 
Tree-sloths (cousins to armadillos) also specialized in grasp- 
ing organs. One has only three fingers, each armed with 
hook-like claws; its hooks also hang on after death. Our 
ancestors were adapted to an arboreal life; they were not 
enslaved by it. 

Some Primates experimented in fingers. A lemur lost 
his second finger to give the thumb more grasping space. 
Some tried claws instead of nails. The marmoset has a 
thumb nail, the other fingers have curved, pointed claws. As 
Primates progressed, nails replaced claws and all five fingers 
were put to use. With the gibbon, the prehensile hand was 
well developed. Early lemurs lived on rather than in the 
tree-tops. The gibbon does not walk on trees, but swings 
from limb to limb. Its hand is more specialized than ‘ours, 

66 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH, LIFE, AND SEX 


farther evolved from the ancestral type. The orang’s thumb 
is almost gone; often has no nail. 

Several animals tried out the prehensile tail: chameleons, 
opossums, an ant-eater, and some New World monkeys. Old 
World monkeys were wiser. The spider monkey’s marvelous 
tail cost him two thumbs; in gaining a “fifth hand” his true 
hands lost their perfection. 

Invertebrates are allowed as many legs as they please up 
toa millipede. The vertebrate limit is four, two pairs. They 
began with fishes: gills modified for propulsion. Their 
limbs are oars; the tail is rudder and sculling oar. When 
fish crawled out of the water on their belly, their limbs 
were paddles—as are ours in fetal life. Many vertebrates 
kept on crawling on their bellies, and, like most snakes, lost 
their paddles. Whales went back to water and turned their 
front legs into oars again; they lost their hind-limbs. 

Man never was a whale or a snake; nor did he ever walk 
like a horse. He did not go in for stability, as did the horse, 
cow, and elephant; mobility was his goal. In bones, muscles, 
and plan, our forelimb is closer to a frog’s than to a cow’s. 
It is built on the old fish type handed on by amphibians to 
reptiles. Compared with the front foot of a horse, our hand 
is primitive and ancient, closer to the hand of an extinct 
iguanadon of Jurassic-Cretaceous times. 

With that type of limb the first Primates climbed a tree. 
It was a four-piece arm: humerus, swinging free at the side 
and held against the shoulder-blade, which in turn was held 
out and away from the body by the collar-bone acting as a 
strut; forearm of radius and ulna, making possible the-right- 
side-up, upside-down hand movements; wrist joint of eight 
bones; five fingers. These bones can all be matched in the 
“hand” of a mud turtle, but not in the forefoot of a horse. 
The turtle’s wrist has one more bone, the central. All men, 
gorillas, and chimpanzees have it in the fetal hand. It then 
incorporates with the scaphoid bone. It sometimes forgets to 
incorporate. 

67 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


When our ancestor walked down the tree, his forelimb was 
already an arm and a hand; the tree had saved it from a 
leg’s fate. His hand could grasp the ball; his arm could 
““wind’’ it up, as does the pitcher before he puts it over. It 
did not have far to go to become the hand that rocks the 
cradle. : 

A large litter is wasted energy without a suitable nursery. 
The horse specialized in grass-cutting teeth and fast legs. 
It has no nursery; the colt can run the day it is born. It must, 
or the wolves will get it. Our Primate mother had no 
natural nursery, but she had a natural clinging disposition— 
as had her baby. As brain and body developed, the baby’s 
dependence on its mother became more profound. Apes 
carry their young in their arms, as does man. Even a young 
gibbon is dependent on its mother for seven or eight months; 
she carries it to the water, bathes it, dries it. A gorilla 
mother boxes her young hopeful’s ears, and the male guides 
and guards all his children. 

Interpret all this in terms of pa, ma, and the baby. The 
family grows larger. Family circle. Divided cares, mutual 
responsibility. Human behavior began up there. 

The tree-living Marsupial carries her young in a pouch: 
a marvelous contrivance, a wonder-work of nature. The 
tree-living Primate carries hers in her lap. She had to sit 
up: she had to have a columnar instead of an arched spine; 
hips to hold viscera; head poised at one end of the spine for 
better control; chest flattened to agree with the columnar 
spine; diaphragm shifted in position and moorings to con- 
form to the new style of breathing; muscles once needed for 
breathing now used to hang the arms at the sides of the body 
and swing them out from the body. 

Such were some of the changes required before the primi- 
tive mammal that climbed the tree could walk down and con- 
quer the earth. But not until earth became man’s home did 
his trunk reach hour-glass form. Then it was that the 
mamme took on well-developed nipples and their encircling 

68 





THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH, LIFE, AND SEX 


areola. But as Woods Jones says, something more subtle 
than mere change in bone and muscle was involved in man’s 
evolution. The kind of life lived through the ages up the 
tree made possible the kind of wits needed to live at the 
foot of it. There were no baby-farms or homes for children 
of missionaries-abroad or officers-absent-on-foreign-duty, in 
Miocene times; “‘mother love” was more necessary then for 
the lives of young apes than it is to-day for their descendants. 


3 


In twenty million years the Age of Reptiles produced eight- 
een orders. Five survive; too much specialization. Osborn 
named one Tyrannosaurus rex. That saurian king was forty- 
seven feet long, twenty feet high, heavier than an elephant. 
His teeth were half a foot long; his feet were armed with 
mighty claws. He was a perfect machine: in speed, size, 
power, and ferocity, the most destructive engine that ever 
lived! 

He is an also-ran. Inside his thirty-six cubic feet of skull. 
box he had less than a pound of brains! 

The big-bodied pin-headed Reptiles were gigantic failures, 
as were the first mammals nature experimented with. Both 
turned to rock and left no descendants to mourn their loss. 
And yet they had had everything conceivable in dental 
weapons and heavy armor. Not enough brains! 

With Oligocene times began another series of mammals; 
more brains in proportion to body. Nearly all of them are 
alive to-day. It was man’s salvation to have had a tree- 
climbing ancestor at that time. 

Early land vertebrates smelled their way through life; 
foods, friends, mates, all through the ends of their noses, 
Like a dog. The scent was lost in the trees; also the need 
for a long-drawn-out face, like a horse’s, an ant-eater’s, or 
an elephant’s. Monkeys do not touch things with their snout, 

69 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


but with their finger tips, which are as good as most animals’ 
tongues for feeling things out. 

Sight is much more valuable than smell. Having no need 
for snouts, Primates shortened their faces. Having little need 
for feet, they developed their hands. Hands could bring 
things up to the eyes. Eyes could settle down where they 
would be handiest. The eyes moved on to the front of the 
face. Each eye sees an independent picture, but the pictures 
overlap; the eyes can correlate and blend them into one. 
Thus, Primates’ eyes are binoculars with stereoscopic effect. 
Many mammals have no such binoculars. 

What can an elephant know of its body? It can feel very 
little of it, see even less. What does a monkey not know of 
its body? What its hands feel, its eyes can picture. The 
brain knows nothing of muscles, but it becomes a store- 
house of pictured movements. 

And so man’s headpiece became a compact, snug affair; 
eyes, ears, nose, tongue, teeth, all close together, easily 
turned this way or that. With two, sometimes four, hands 
available to bring things close. The brain grew as its re- 
quirements grew. The motor mechanism of the body kept 
improving; more brain needed to work it. The more it was 
worked, the better it grew. Its areas of association between 
hearing and seeing, seeing and touching, etc., kept on grow- 
ing. These areas are the distinguishing features of man’s 
brain. 

If man had received no more than mere bodily form from 
his monkey ancestor, he might as well have had an opossum 
for an ancestor. It was not mere body that made monkeys 
smart; nor their brain that produced their hand. Their brain 
made the most of their hand, but, as Jones says, while man 
can play the violin because he has a big brain, what could 
his brain do if his hand were a horse’s foot? 

Man’s ancestor won his freedom not so much by special- 
ization as because he kept his plasticity, extended his wits, 
and improved his control. 

70 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH, LIFE, AND SEX 


4 


Eocene times knew nothing of tabloid foods and nature 
herself was the dentist. No teeth, no food; no food, no life. 
Instead of a knife, the primitive Primate used its incisors; 
instead of meat-chopper or mortar and pestle, its molars. It 
stabbed its prey with its hand, but kept the big canine to 
show what it could do when angry. It saved its teeth by 
using them. They were not good for anything in particular; 
they were good enough for almost everything in nature’s 
larder. Our teeth are among the most primitive of all 
mammals. Our four-cusped molars are more like those of 
extinct Eocene mammals than they are like those of living 
apes. We are the shortest-snouted Primate; our teeth, alone 
of Primates, are in one continuous series. There is a real 
gap between canine and incisors in apes; also in our milk 
set—or should be, shorter jaws are lessening the gap. 

Our ancestral Primate was a small, warm-blooded, primi- 
tive mammal with forty-four teeth, four short legs all alike, 
and feet with five toes armed with claws. It lived on insects, 
worms, fruit, and nuts. Who was its ancestor? How did it 
become viviparous? Where did it get its mammae? 

Circumstantial evidence points to a dog-toothed, low- 
browed, Triassic reptile, called Cynodont. He is older than 
the giant reptiles which appeared millions of years later, 
lower than the reptiles which led to dinosaurs, which in 
turn led to crocodiles and birds. If not the Cynodonts, then 
we must assume that mammals started in the Permian period. 
Some say it was in Africa, but probably Central Asia will 
prove to be the birthplace of reptiles and mammals. 

The reptile that developed into mammal had teeth fit for 
a mixed diet. It could run, making possible a broader out- 
look and a surer hold on life. Legs that lifted the belly from 
the ground made warm blood possible. Warm blood made 
energy more easily available and personal incubation of the 
egg possible. And there is no more interesting tale in the 

71 


. WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


book of nature than the one which recounts her experiments 
in eggs. 

Mammals get their name from their mammae or milk- 
glands. All mammals suckle their young, although true 
teats appear only with marsupials, the second order of 
mammals. Monotremes, the lowest mammals, lay eggs, as do 
all birds, amphibians, fishes, and most reptiles. 

But there is a vast difference between monotreme, bird, 
and reptile eggs, and amphibian and fish eggs. The latter 
are laid in water; they develop in water. Amphibian eggs 
develop into tadpoles which live like fish; by and by their 
gills close, their tails are absorbed, their fins become legs; 
they hop up frogs or toads. But frogs can no more live 
all their life under water than can whales or porpoises: they 
must come up for air. Amphibians lead double lives. 

As do some men. But our fetal gill-clefts never break 
through. We can thank our reptile ancestor for that. Nor 
do reptiles or birds have gill-breathing apparatus. Their 
young do not metamorphose from a larval stage. The alli- 
gator deposits her eggs in dry ground; if deposited in water 
the eggs would “drown,” as would birds’ eggs. 

Reptiles, ancestors of birds and mammals, invented a 
new style of egg to get away from the double life led by 
amphibians. All eggs are complex, but this reptilian egg 
was the first to have a shell or protective envelope, and a 
yolk inside: food to tide the embryo over the first stage of 
life, oxygen until it grows a lung. 

The embryo develops an amnion, or protective membrane 
of two layers; between, amniotic fluid——-storm-door and shock- 
absorber. Also a second membrane, the sac-like allantois. 
This is connected with the embryo’s blood vessels; it is the 
embryo’s “lung.” Oxygen, entering through the pores of 
the eggshell, is picked up by the allantois and carried to the 
embryo; the returning blood-stream carries carbon dioxide. 
The egg must have air or the embryo within is asphyxiated. 

, 12 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH, LIFE, AND SEX 


As the yolk-sac diminishes, the allantois grows in size and 
efficiency. 

Certain snakes and all mammals except monotremes are 
viviparous: their young are born alive. What has happened? 
The egg is incubated within the maternal body. The lung-like 
allantois becomes placenta and unbilical cord. The placenta 
crows fast to the wall of the mother’s uterus. Through the 
connecting umbilicus the embryo gets oxygen and nutrition. 
Yolk—as in birds’ eggs—is not needed. But nature is per- 
sistent; the human embryo has a yolk-sac, but no yolk. 

This vade mecum incubator is a great advance over the 
reptilian way of letting the sun do it. But reptiles get the 
credit for the new-style eggs. They were nature’s answer to 
a drought. That drought gave reptiles their great start. Those 
that developed blunt dagger-like teeth into grinders with 
cusps, and eggs that could hatch in a desert, were the reptiles 
that led to mammals and man—and made valuable contribu- 
tions to science. 

Our indebtedness to reptiles, then, is very great: our ante- 
natal robes, four-chambered heart, and a rising temperature 
leading to warm blood. Some even go so far as to credit 
a certain reptile with our ideas of the Tree of Knowledge. 
Our family life was founded in the trees; but it is rooted in 
the placenta. The long and intimate commingling of parent 
and fetus had far-reaching consequences. The first placenta 
was developed in the reptilian ancestor. By the time that 
reptile had become mammal, it had warm blood, a hairy 
bedy, and a muscular diaphragm between lungs and liver. 


3 


Reptiles developed the habit of living on dry land. An 
amphibian pointed the way. in the Upper Carboniferous 
Age. The family name of that amphibian is Stegocephalia— 
because he had a roof over his head. He may date from 
the Devonian period. He was heavily armored, and a flesh- 

13 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


eater. His four limbs were well developed for crawling; 
his bones, in number and character, were of the type that 
millions of years later developed into the prehensile hands 
and feet of Primates. He retained enough of his fish habits 
to compel his return to water to deposit the eggs. In the 
water the young developed. 

To that amphibian ancestor we are indebted for four price- 
less possessions: fingers and toes, true lungs, a wagging 
tongue, vocal cords. The bullfrog inherits his voice direct, 
nor is there evidence that he has improved it. It is known 
that he puts it to the use. it had from the start—a mate-call. 
A vocal mate-call could have been of no use under water; 
in swampy lands it was a necessity. 

Beyond, and older than amphibians, are fishes. Our debt 
to them is greatest of all: skull, at first a rude brain-box of 
gristle; true jaws; limbs supported by bones articulating 
with an axial skeleton. Such parts distinguish us from 
devil-fish, oysters, clams, barnacles, and fleas. With such 
parts, nature began to branch out on new lines; new lines 
had something to go on. They could develop brain, the 
skull protected it; a real spinal cord, the backbone carried 
it. With skeleton inside instead of outside the body, and of 
bone instead of shell, they could develop big strong bodies. 
With their paired limbs they could travel, explore, experi- 
ment. With their new type of mental machinery, they could 
record new experiences. 

What an amazing tribute to the persistence of nature! Every 
normal human embryo develops a notochord. That notochord 
is the oldest and only original “backbone,” the only back- 
bone to-day of the amphioxus or lancelet, possibly the only 
living representative in direct line of the inventor of the 
vertebrate idea. 

From Cambrian days, when the first notochord was laid 
in the first fish, possibly a half-billion years were to roll 
from the scroll of life before man was to puzzle his brain 
to discover the nature of the creature that decided it would 
74 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH, LIFE, AND SEX 


be easier to carry its skeleton inside its body than on its 
shoulders. 

That creature is not yet known. Countless tons of rock 
weigh it down. It had no bones, possibly no shell. Its re- 
mains may never be found; its soft body may have left no 
remains. 

Beyond vertebrates, the skein is tangled. Nature tried 
many types of bodies before she found one fit for a fish. 
That was no mean honor. Fishes are highly organized; they 
stand high in the tree of life. The parts they transmitted to 
posterity made frogs, lizards, eagles, monkeys, and man 
possible. No essential part has been acquired since the first 
fish laid the keel on which every vertebrate builds its body. 
The very bones of our middle ear began their career in the 
arch of the gill of a fish. The wonderful mechanism by 
which we know when we are right side up was invented by 
a fish. 

What makes a body fit for a fish? What did an invertebrate 
have to have before it could think ef becoming a shark or a 
sturgeon or a cod? 

No protozoon would do; it has only one cell. The lowest 
multi-cellular animals are sponges; but they are primitive 
and lead a plant’s life. Next come jellyfish, polyps, corals. 
Some drift with the current, others settle down to build 
coral reefs from their limestone skeletons. ‘They have in- 
sides for circulation and digestion, but their bedy is built 
on the plan of a tub. 

The next three higher groups, flatworms, threadworms, 
_wheelworms, look like something; the first two especially. 

With them nature tried out an epoch-making experiment— 
bilateral symmetry: two sides, two ends. They could tell 
right from left and knew whether they were going ahead 
or astern. Good-by to the old watchful waiting, or drifting. 
round-the-circle davs. Strenuous life moves straight ahead. 

Earthworms seem low to us. But a jellyfish would have 
to look up to them, they are so highly organized; even an 

75 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


amphioxus respects them. They have regular parts; they 
repair lost parts better than a surgeon. They have a sug- 
gestion of a backbone and spinal cord; mouth, esophagus, 
intestine with posterior opening; nervous system, brain and 
nerve chain; pulsating vessels to circulate the blood; kidneys; 
striated muscle. If our vertebrate ancestor was no worm, it 
was a worm-like form. The fishworm has the form and all 
the essential parts. It even has two sexes in one body; it is 
a true hermaphrodite. } 

With molluscs nature experimented with soft bodies pro- 
tected by shell armor. It was a pretty idea, and gave us 
pearls, clams, oysters, and snails; but the shells so slowed 
them up and weighed them down they could never get away to 
a fast start or far from the mud. 

Starfish represent another experiment. Possibly our deci- 
mal system is due to the two five-fingered hands inherited 
from a starfish ancestor. 

Joint-foot arthropods are high invertebrates. Some have 
very perfect bodies and enough instincts to fill a book. They 
are segmented and have well-developed legs—though neither 
grasshopper, cricket, nor locust goes “on all-four,” as Leviti- 
cus misinforms us. They go on all six; spiders and scor- 
pions, on all eight. | 

That exhausts the possibilities. But which invertebrate 
line is founder of vertebrates is not yet determined. It may 
have been a fishworm. It may have been a scorpion, or a 
horseshoe crab, It may have been an unknown family which 
split, one branch leading to the amphioxus, which has a real 
notochord, but no skull and no red blood. 

Poor fish as it is, the amphioxus is the nearest living ances- 
tor of vertebrates. They live a quiet life near the shore, 
generally buried in sand up to their gills. They have the 
makings of a true fish, even to the nervous system; but are 
only a fish in the making. And of all the bodies nature tried 
out during countless millions of years, no survival has the 

76 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH, LIFE, AND SEX 


long, slender, segmented body that so closely resembles the 
amphioxus as a fishworm. 


6 


Subkingdom I, Protozoa; subkingdom II, Metazoa. That 
is all. Man belongs to the second subkingdom: his is a 
many-celled body, all from an original cell. 

Flower in crannied wall may be more poetic, but if we 
knew all about the one-celled ameba, we should know more 
about life than we are likely to know for some time. If we 
knew why several Protozoa decided to found a co-operative 
society and so the subkingdom Metazoa, and if we had the 
minutes of their first meeting, we should be able to manu- 
facture animals to suit our fancy. If we knew the nature 
of the jelly called protoplasm of the ameba’s body, we should 
know what life itself is. 

With the mere mention of the word “protoplasm” we have, 
as the farmers say, a lot of hay down. We cannot get all 
our “hay” in before it rains; some of it spoils. We call in 
the biochemist, but by the time he gets it in a test tube or 
stains it so that he can see it, what was living jelly is dead. 
He examines only the remains—the “débris,” as Lull calls it. 

Protoplasm (first-molded-thing) is called living jelly be- 
cause it is about of the consistency of jelly. It is semi-fluid, 
generally transparent, and colorless. It may contain granules 
which make it grayish in color and semi-transparent. Some 
of these granules may be stained, and are called chromatin. 
This appears as a central spherical mass, and is called the 
nucleus (nux, nut) ; the remainder of the protoplasm is called 
cytoplasm. 

Protoplasm is known only by the body it keeps; but 
whether one cell is the entire body or only one in a body of 
billions of cells, every cell has certain properties or func- | 
tions. It is self-supporting; it has its own definite wall, 
or is so cohesive that its outer surface serves the purpose of a 

7 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


wall. It eats; it must have food or it dies. It must get rid of 
waste. It moves. Its movements may be of the flowing kind 
or “ameboid”—part or parts of it flow out in processes, like 
the movements of the ameba. Or, it may be covered in whole 
or part with fine cilia which set up whipping movements. 
It is excitable or irritable: when touched, it moves. It re- 
sponds to certain stimuli. It has conductivity: a stimulus at 
one side may lead to movement on the opposite side. It can 
co-ordinate its movements, as it does in such harmonious 
actions of the cilia or the pseudopoda in ameboid move- 
ments. It grows or has the power of reproduction. 

The ameba can be studied only under the microscope. It 
is literally a speck of living jelly, but it is as “alive” as an 
elephant or a whale. It goes about for food. It flees from 
danger. It is sensitive to stimuli from without. It breathes 
oxygen and gives off carbon dioxide; collects, digests, and 
distributes food; excretes waste; reproduces its kind. It can 
learn from experience. It is organized for one purpose only: 
life. Within that limit it fails in no essential. 

What is the ameba? Life. What is life? Protoplasm—— 
ultramicroscopic, unanalyzable; but only living if it behaves 
like a living being. 

Protoplasm is 72 per cent oxygen, 13.5 per cent carbon, 
9.1 per cent hydrogen, and 2.5 per cent nitrogen. The re- 
maining 3 per cent consists of sulphur, phosphorus, chlorine, 
sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium, iron, and silicon. 
Add a pinch of fluorine, iodine, and manganese; and that is 
what little girls are made of. 

Such is the stuff of life. How about the staff of life? For, 
as Huxley said, while a solution of smelling salts in water, 
with a tiny pinch of some other saline matter, contains all 
the elements which make up protoplasm, a hogshead of that 
fluid would not keep a hungry man from starving, nor save 
any animal from like fate. It is equally true that if animals 
lived only on dead animals, the animal world would perish 


8 





THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH, LIFE, AND SEX 


through cannibalism. Even nature cannot pull herself up 
by her bootstraps. 

Which takes us out into the open and face to face with life 
itself. No one quite knows what life is, but there are certain 
fairly accurate tests for life. One is growth. Are certain 
bacteria alive? Put them in a suitable medium: if they grow, 
they are alive; if not, they are dead. We stop growing 
larger, but when there is no growth anywhere in our body 
we are dead and our own digestive juices will begin to digest 
our body. 

The point is that plants are older than animals and bacteria 
older than both; and that there is no sharp line between lowest 
animals and lowest plants or any general agreement as to 
whether bacteria are plants or animals. Nor does it make any 
particular difference to us. What matters is that animals 
must rely on plants or other animals for their growth-material 
and that plants are not so dependent; they can live on mate- 
rials which would be death to animals. With carbon dioxide, 
water, and nitrogenous salts, a plant will multiply a billion- 
fold—‘‘building up the matter of life from the common 
matter of the universe.” But where do they get their nitro- 
genous salts? 

Bacteria. Their daily bread is a few simple minerals. 
Without bacteria, air, land, and ocean to-day would be life- 
less. They were the primordial chemists, finding food in a 
foodless world, drawing their energy and their nutrition 
direct from lifeless compounds. We shall have a closer look 
at them later. It is enough now to pay a tribute to them 
for having helped form the crust of the earth and so prepare 
the land and sea for the evolution of higher life. Without 
them, life on earth as we know it is inconceivable, nor would 
life be possible to-day without them. 

In other words, this earth was once lifeless and about as 
big as Mars, half its present size. To imagine it as it was 
then, Osborn asks us to subtract all mineral deposits of 
srganic origin, such as organic carbonates, phosphates, and 

79 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


lime; carbonaceous shales and limestones; graphites; silicates 
derived from diatoms; iron deposits; humus of the soil; soil 
derived from rocks broken down by bacteria; and ooze of the 
ocean floor. The shells of microscopically small diatoms 
alone make up 6 per cent of the bottom of ten million square 
miles of sea! 

These organic deposits cover the earth miles deep. They 
fitted it for higher forms of life. And all due to microorgan- 
isms. Geikie thinks it might have required four hundred 
million years. 


v4 


The earth itself, according to Chamberlin, our foremost 
geologist, is an offspring of the sun; as are the other seven 
planets, the twenty-six satellites, and the eight hundred planet- 
oids which make up our planetary system. In giving birth 
to them, the sun parted with less than an eight-hundredth part 
of its body, the earth itself representing about three-thou- 
sandths of 1 per cent of the sun’s substance. In other words, 
our earthly home is considerably less than the proverbial drop 
in the bucket of our heavenly parent. 

Birth of earth and other planets was due to a passing star. 
It was bigger and denser than the sun and consequently had 
a greater pull. It attracted little bits of the sun away. One 
bit is our earth, held to its course by pull, by gravity. Were 
the pull of the sun to be altered, the orbit our earth makes 
about the sun would change. 

It happened this way. The sun is so hot that it explodes 
sun-stuff or gas-bolts. They travel 300 miles a second and 
may project 300,000 miles beyond the sun’s surface before 
they drop back again. 

Along came a huge star, itself a sun, bieeeo denser, than 
our little sun. Its pull was so great that the sun stuff that 
happened to be erupting was drawn so far out it could not 
fall back. It was mostly gas, the parts nearest the sun hottest: 

80 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH, LIFE, AND SEX 


It kept on moving, condensing; it came finally to be broken 
up into bits. Each bit kept on traveling in its own orbit about 
the sun—held by the sun’s pull, but each too distant to be 
pulled back into the sun. 

Chamberlin assumes that several gas-bolts were pulled 
from the sun. From the first grew Neptune and Uranus; 
from the second, Saturn and Jupiter. These great planets 
are still hot and gaseous. On the return journey the pass- 
ing star loosed another gas-bolt; from it grew the terrestrial 
planets: Earth, Venus, Mars, and Mercury. 

The earth to-day is five and one-half times heavier than 
an equal volume of water. At first it was not so dense, 
more nebulous, and of varying density. Knots of denser 
matter condensed into liquid or solid cores. These grew by 
drawing into themselves smaller knots. This could happen 
because their orbits kept changing according to their change 
in density. The largest core kept on picking up bits that 
came in its path. It kept on growing denser. The earth is 
still growing. | 

When only a nebulous knot, the earth was magnetic, and 
is now. It “selected” the matter that was to form its core: 
iron, nickel, cobalt. It picked up planetesimal dust, meteor- 
ites, etc. It began to draw an atmosphere about it. From 
the atmosphere fell the rain, the primitive waters in the earth’s 
cavities. Thus there came to be a lithosphere, a hydrosphere, 
an atmosphere. 

Our atmosphere is chiefly nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and 
water-vapor; all were in the original nebulous knot. Some 
gases were carried into the inside of the earth, to be let 
loose again by volcanic action. Some simply gathered more 
and more closely about the earth; the earth’s pull was enough 
to hold them. 

When the young earth had reached 30 per cent of its 
growth, it could begin to draw to it the water-vapor that had 
been shot from the sun. Thereafter, the water on the earth 
and in the atmosphere strove to maintain an equilibrium. But 

8l 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


the temperature kept changing and the atmosphere kept cir- 
culating. The earth has always had its arid as well as its 
humid areas; it was never enveloped in a “warm moist atmos- 
phere.” 

Our earth began, then, with a small lithosphere, a small 
hydrosphere, a small atmosphere. These reacted on each 
other, always in co-operation, always in competition and an- 
tagonism. Even to-day land, water, and air struggle for the 
mastery. The story of that struggle is the history of the 
earth. The oldest rock record known shows that the earth 
was then about as it is to-day, mostly land areas, wide seas. 
Water and air struggle to wear the land down, only to have 
it buckle up again in some new mountain range, the waters to 
retire to new abysmal depths. 

As long as volcanoes last, the earth will not get over- 
heated because of pressure toward the core. Through vol- 
canoes, as through the pores of our skin, the earth rids itself 
of excess heat and fluids. Thus, the earth is always becoming 
more solid, more rigid; its lighter and more mobile material 
is constantly being forced to the surface, again to be buried, 
reheated, reorganized, and part of it to be belched forth 
again. Its core now is chiefly metallic, its envelope of a 
fluid-like nature; the whole, immobile, refractory, crystalline. 
_ The gas-bolt that was pulled by a passing star from its 
parent sun and grew into earth carried the elements of life. 
When the earth was fit for life, life came; the inorganic 
elements reorganized into organic compounds. That was as 
radical a move in the earth’s evolution as was its break from 
the sun. 


8 
With the words we build with our A B C’s we name the 


universe nature builds with her L M N’s—as the Romans 

called them, from the letters on the tablets on which children 

learned to write. The world of matter is what it is because 
82 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH, LIFE, AND SEX 


the elements are what they are and what they become when 
chemically united. Each element is unique and has unique 
behavior, but matter assumes an infinite variety of forms 
because two or more elements can surrender their individ- 
uality and become a new substance with unique behavior. 

A-r-w is a meaningless mixture of letters; w-a-r is a loaded 
word and has infinite possibilities. With only two elements, 
thousands of new substances are possible; with three, the 
possible combinations are enormously increased. With C, H, 
O, and N, and a pinch of salts, every living thing is possible. 

Why? It is their nature. 

‘“‘Nature” can mean anything. For example, sodium is a 
metal, lighter than water; a drop of it on our tongue or on a 
sweaty hand catches fire and burns a hole. Chlorine is a 
gas, heavier than air, so corrosive that a few whiffs are fatal; 
it was the poison gas in the World War. Of these two ele- 
ments combined in one, we use about thirty million tons a 
year. It is found on every table, eaten at every meal. 
Sodium chloride is common everyday table salt: in large 
quantities, fatal; in moderate amounts, good for man and 
beast. 

What is the nature of salt? Why do we require a certain 
amount of salt in our diet? Why will salt preserve meat? 
Why do sodium and chlorine lose their specific characters 
when united as salt? Why is sodium electrically positive, 
chlorine negative? Why is the human body rubbed with 
wool positively charged; rubbed with silk, negatively 
charged? What is the nature of electricity? 

The nature of things is what we know of things. Of some 
we have the number, we know their law. For example, with 
hydrogen, chlorine forms hydrochloric (muriatic) acid, so 
strongly caustic that it will eat the enamel off a tooth or 
dissolve a bone. Dogs’ stomachs secrete more hydrochloric 
acid than ours; they digest bones better than we do. Why 
our stomach secretes hydrochloric acid is one question; how 
our body separates the chlorine out of salt and the hydrogen 

83 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


from water (both difficult chemical processes) and com- 
bines them into a powerful acid that will digest gristle, is 
another. The first question is on a par with thousands of 
others as yet beyond the pale of science. 

What is the nature of elements? The answer is so astound- 
ing that the world has hardly yet recovered its breath, so 
far-reaching in its implications that science has not yet 
grasped its full significance. 

Science recognizes eighty-two and actually knows seventy- 
nine stable elements. There are, in addition, ten heavy 
radioactive elements, which, unlike the stable elements, are 
transmuting themselves into lighter elements. 

The unit or smallest quantity of an element which takes 
part in a chemical reaction is an atom (uncutable). 
Recently, the atom has been “cut.” It consists of unit 
charges of positive and negative electricity called electrons. 
While electrons are alike in strength of electric charge, nega- 
tive electrons have a mass or inertia 1/1845th of the lightest 
known atom, hydrogen. In other words, the weight of the 
negative as compared with the positive electron is almost 
negligible. 

An atom, then, says Millikan, consists of a heavy core or 
nucleus of free positive electrons about which are grouped 
enough negative electrons to render the whole atom stable 
or neutral. “Hence the number of negative electrons out- 
side the nucleus must be such as to have a total charge equal 
to the free positive charge of the nucleus; otherwise the 
atom could not be neutral.” As the weight of the atom 
depends almost entirely upon its nucleus, and as hydrogen is 
the lightest element, the atomic weight of other elements is 
an expression of their weight compared with that of 
hydrogen. 

The atomic number of hydtogen is 1. Its nucleus carries 
one electron of positive charge; outside that nucleus is one 
electron of negative charge. The two electrons thus neu- 
tralize each other; the result is a system, an atom of 

84 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH, LIFE, AND SEX 


hydrogen. The heaviest known element is uranium; its 
atomic weight is 238. Its nucleus, therefore, must contain 
238 positive electrons. But as its atomic number is 92, its 
nucleus must carry, in addition, 146 negative electrons to 
neutralize the 146 positive electrons over and above the 92 
positive electrons free to neutralize the 92 negative electrons 
outside the nucleus. The result is a system, an atom of 
uranium. Remove one free positive electron from the 
nucleus of that atom; it is no longer an atom of uranium. 
Remove 10 free positive electrons; it is an atom of lead. 
Remove 13; it is an atom of gold. Remove 91; it is an 
atom of hydrogen gas. The 92 elements are determined, 
says Millikan, simply by the difference between the number 
of positives and negatives packed into the nucleus. All 
elements, ideally at least, are transmutable into one another 
by a simple change in this difference. 

Magnify the nucleus of an atom one billion times; it is 
still too small to be seen in a microscope. Multiply that 
nucleus ten billion times: the outer electrons are now three 
feet from the nucleus, but the nucleus itself is not yet as big 
as a pin-point. The nucleus, then, is less than 1/10,000 
the diameter of the atom—and yet it may contain, as does 
the uranium atom, 384 electrons. No wonder that Millikan 
can shoot helium atoms by the billion through a thin glass 
evacuated tube “without leaving any holes behind.” Atoms 
themselves are mostly “holes,” as is most of our solar system. 
The negative electron compared with the size of the atom 
itself is no larger than is the earth compared with the radius 
of its orbit about the sun. And yet atoms themselves are 
“infinitely small”! Electrons must be infinitely smaller. Or 
rather, smallest conceivable—for the electron itself is now 
believed to be the indivisible, ultimate unit of matter. 

When matter in the form of an electron moves, there is an 
electric current. Which means, says Millikan, that electricity 
and matter look like different aspects of one and the same 

; 85 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


thing. There is proof that electricity is material; there is 
evidence, but not yet proof, that all matter is electrical. 

The electron itself, then, is a speck of electricity; it has 
definite granular structure; it is the primordial stuff of the 
universe of matter. When specks of electricity are combined 
in certain ways and proportions, certain neutral systems 
result, and we have the atoms of the elements of all physical 
bodies which are described in terms of chemistry and 
physics—matter and energy. 

Science knows nothing of the ultimate origin of matter 
or of the source of energy; it only accepts both as facts and 
goes on with its business of trying to find out what matter 
is and what energy can do. In other words, the problem of 
the origin of life is locked up in the origin of matter and 
in the nature of energy. But the line between life and death 
is not unlike that between organic and inorganic, a vague 
shadowy line crossed from day to day in the chemical labora- 
tory. Life has been produced in no man-made shop; proto- 
plasm, the chemical matter of life, has been. Jt does every- 
thing but live! It does not seem fit for life. 


9 


Life cannot live without food. Food cannot be had in a 
red-hot sun, in the interior of the earth, or in a nebula of gas. 

We hear much of “‘fitness,’’ but always the fitness of the 
organism. There is another fitness—that of the earth itself. 
Before trees, there was no arboreal life; before plants, no 
animals. Only as the fitness of the environment evolved 
could life evolve. Environment and life go together. Fit- 
ness of environment is as essential to life as it is to a snow- 
flake, a salt crystal, a diamond, or a river; nor are these 
more thinkable out of their environment than is any living 
being, or more easily “explained” away. The fitness of the 
earth’s environment for life has been beautifully worked out 
by Henderson. 

86 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH, LIFE, AND SEX 


The earth keeps its atmosphere because of its size and 
relation to the sun. This fact and the nature of its atmosphere 
led to winds and clouds, rain, snow and ice, lakes and rivers, 
oceans and ocean currents, tides, and magnetic and electric 
phenomena. 

In the earth’s atmosphere were carbon, hydrogen, and 
oxygen. From carbon and oxygen came carbon dioxide; 
from hydrogen and oxygen, water. With water, carbon 
dioxide, and carbon compounds, living things became pos- 
sible. These three. The greatest of these is water. 

There is nothing like water. Over seventy per cent of our 
body weight is water. Much of life lives in water and all 
of life dries up without water. No water, no life. Life as 
we know it is inconceivable without water. In fact, Prout, 
the theologian, thought it the most remarkable instance of 
“design” in all nature: “Something done expressly, and 
almost (could we conceive such a thing of the Deity) at 
second thought, to accomplish a particular object.” 

Why does the highly inflammable gas hydrogen, united in 
certain proportions to oxygen, another gas and necessary for 
combustion, always produce water, which is not only not 
inflammable, but a hindrance to combustion? The “why” 
of water is unknown. Much is known of its behavior, in 
some respects more weird than that of a child. We speak 
of “solving” problems. Water is the great solvent. We may 
not suffer from water on the brain, but conscious brains are 
85 per cent water. Were our brains only 60 per cent water, 
they would be as dense as tendons; if only 20 per cent, as 
hard as the skull itself; and if 10 per cent, just fat. 

More substances will dissolve in water than in any other 
liquid. Each year the earth’s rivers carry to the sea five 
billion tons of dissolved minerals and other unnumbered 
millions of tons of carbon compounds. Water is the great 
dissolvent of food before it is taken into the cells and as it 
leaves the body through the sweat glands, kidneys, or lungs. 
Over 90 per cent of the blood of our transport system is 

87 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


water, holding in solution iodine, bromine, iron, sulphates, 
urea, ammonia, etc. The water excretion of our body carries 
off in solution countless organic substances, as well as 
chlorides, bromides, iodides, phosphates, potassium, sodium, 
ammonia, magnesium, iron, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, argon, 
etc. 

Chemical reactions take place in water; electrical forces 
are at work, forces which bind atoms into molecules and 
cause chemical reactions. Acids and salts are electrolytes: 
they can carry electric currents, they can be dissolved. by 
electric currents. In dissolution, ions (goings) are formed; 
they carry the current. 

Life is dynamic. Every living thing is a dynamo. Its 
electricity, like that of batteries, comes from the ions of 
atoms of electric charge set free when molecules of acids, 
bases, and salts are split up. Ions are back of protoplasm 
and essential to all life processes. Water is the supreme 
solvent for ionization. 

A heart cut from a living body keeps right on beating 
provided it is kept in proper solution. What is “proper” 
for a heart? A change in the hydrogen ion concentration 
of one ten-billionth part in that solution is improper: the 
heart stops. The control over such salt solutions is now so 
perfect that glands can be kept alive while awaiting trans- 
plantation into foreign bodies. 

Water is chemically and physically stable; inert in the 
atmosphere; almost inactive on the surface and in the soil. 
It changes few substances, it is not easily changed. It is 
almost everywhere present in the soil; and in the atmosphere 
as clouds and vapor. Its high specific heat tempers both 
summer and winter. The tropics is a vast warm reservoir; 
the poles, cold reservoirs. This makes for circulation of the 
atmosphere and ocean currents. Water’s high specific heat 
also makes it possible for man to produce 2,400 calories 
a day, enough to raise his temperature to 150 degrees, and 
yet keep his body at its normal temperature. i 

88 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH, LIFE, AND SEX 


Water can be cooled to the freezing point; it can get no 
colder than ice. With the thermometer forty degrees below 
zero, a cake of ice is almost the next best thing to a stove. 
Lakes and oceans cannot get colder than the freezing point 
of water. This makes water a powerful regulator of the 
earth’s temperature. 

Most substances contract with cold. If water obeyed this 
law, most of life would go out of business every winter. 
Water loses density on cooling; it rises to the top. Lakes 
and rivers freeze from the top down, not from the bottom up. 

Life is colloidal, like glue, jelly, protoplasm; it has no 
definite, rigid, predetermined form, as has a crystal. Colloid 
structures are complex beyond man’s present capacity to 
resolve them when in the form of protoplasm. Protoplasm 
can live because it can absorb food substances. The force 
which operates upon colloidal structure is surface tension of 
water. Surface tension is at the root of all food metabolism. 

In short, water is a vital part of the evolutionary process 
which fitted the earth to be the home of the life that culmi- 
nates in man; fit of its very nature, as Henderson says, 
“with a fitness no less marvelous and varied than that fitness 
of the organism which has been won in the course of organic 
evolution.” 

Every living thing is but a watery solution; man himself, 
but a porous sack of water. But water alone could not have 
led to life without carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is even 
more pervasive than water; it is everywhere. 

Carbon dioxide (carbonic acid or carbonic acid gas—one 
atom of carbon, two of oxygen) is colorless, has an acid 
taste, a pungent smell. Inhaled by animals, death foilows 
from asphyxiation. Eaten by animals, in the sugars and 
starches of plants, it “burns”; what is left over is carbon 
dioxide. Were it not a gas, the task of ridding the body 
of it would be impossible; were it not a freely soluble gas, 
that task again would be impossible. 

Only carbon dioxide enters water as freely as it escapes 

89 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


from water. As water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen 
so firmly wedded that only unusual force tears them apart, 
so water and carbon dioxide are inseparable companions: 
in water itself, in fire, in air, in the earth. Only its unique 
mobility and its wide distribution have made plant life 
possible. 

The lilies of the field toil not; the sun does it for them, 
using carbon dioxide of the air and of the water. The 
cattle of the field have to go to the lilies: the lilies will not 
come to them. Cattle toil with the sun’s energy of green 
grass. We too are children of the sun and toil with its 
energy stored in food plants. For example, a gram of 
glucose contains 3.7 heat units of solar energy. When a 
muscle burns that gram, the 3.7 units are spent: the glucose 
was a temporary depository of energy. The energy was 
released by burning, oxidation. 

Glucose is a carbohydrate—CcsH1206. Ninety-five per cent 
of our body can be accounted for by these same symbols— 
C H O; for water, we need only hydrogen and oxygen; for 
carbon dioxide, only carbon and oxygen. 

When heat and energy were liberated from glucose, the 
oxygen was torn from the carbon and hydrogen. Oxygen 
is almost unique in its energy-liberating processes. Com- 
pounds of carbon, and especially of hydrogen, yield great 
heat in oxidation. No source of energy so good as oxygen. 
No transformers of energy so great as hydrogen and carbon. 
Together, these three elements have unique “‘fitness for the 
organic mechanism. ‘They alone are best fitted to form it 
and set it in motion; and their stable compounds, water and 
carbon dioxide, which make up the changeless environment, 
protect and renew it, forever drawing fresh energy from the 
sunshine.” 

Water is not an organism; it is not life; it is inorganic. 
Carbon dioxide is not an organism; it is not life; but it is 
organic. The carbon makes the vital difference. Protoplasm 
is a very wonderful substance. Remove its carbon: it is 

90 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH, LIFE, AND SEX 


no longer protoplasm; it is not even an “organic” compound. 
The chemist does not “wonder” about protoplasm; he finds 
carbon wonderful enough. 

What is carbon? ‘The lead in the pencil with which I 
write, for one thing. Charcoal is carbon. So is lampblack. 
Also diamonds. What is anelement? A system. Each atom 
of each element is a system. Carbon must be thought of as 
having form, shape, size, mass, architecture. Build atoms 
of carbon one way, and you have a molecule of diamond; 
another way, and you have a molecule of lampblack. Carbon 
alone among the elements can form the skeleton of the com- 
pounds known to organic chemistry. It is a unique sub- 
stance; in its way, as unique as life itself. It is unique 
in its capacity to enter into relationships with other elements. 
One atom of carbon can unite with from one to four other 
atoms to form a compound. Carbon atoms can form ring 
compounds, the rings themselves may unite with carbon 
chains, and so on in bewildering possibilities. With only 
fourteen atoms of carbon and thirty of hydrogen, it is possi- 
ble to form 1,855 distinct and stable compounds. The 
difference between acetylene and paraffin is in the way their 
carbon and hydrogen atoms are combined. 

Add oxygen to carbon and hydrogen: the number of 
organic compounds possible is at once multiplied enormously. 
Alcohol, glycerine, lactic acid, ether, carbolic acid, sugar, 
cotton, camphor, olive oil, starch, oil of wintergreen, vanilla, 
and the venom of the cobra. What a mess—solids, liquids, 
gases! Yet only three elements enter into their make-up: 
carbon, hydrogen, oxygen. The list only suggests the 
diversity that follows from a few of the thousands of possible 
combinations of three seemingly simple chemical elements. 

About a half-million organic compounds are already 
known to chemists. Back of all, carbon. Hydrogen and 
oxygen, next in importance. These three made life possible: 
as water, the carrier of life; as carbon dioxide, the substance 
on which life hangs. 

91 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


From such simple carbon compounds as the baby earth 
inherited from parent sun, grew the more complex and 
subtle carbon compounds that to-day peer into microscopes 


at dividing cells and shake test tubes over gas jets to discover 


what life is. 

The earth’s physical conditions were always changing. 
Matter itself kept changing. Earth, energy, matter, are 
bound together in one continuous change: the history of 
that change is the story of evolution. In the process of 
change life itself was evolved. But only after the environ- 
ment into which life fits itself had evolved to the point that 
it was fit for life. Fitnéss of life and fitness for life are 
two views of the same tale; and both incidents in the greater 
story which goes back through the young earth to the old 
sun, and thence out into the wide universe. Forward, to 
eternity. 


LO 


Snowflake, salt crystal, diamond, are described in terms of 
matter and energy; explained in no terms known to science. 
Life also is described in terms of matter and energy. The 
form or substance of life is complex, much more complex 
than snowflake, salt crystal, or diamond. 

This complexity of living beings requires a mechanism 
organized for durability. The lowest plant is a more com- 
plex mechanism than is a raindrop, a snowflake, or a crystal. 
But, like them, living beings are subject to gravity, and if 
they break the laws of physics and chemistry they no longer 
live: what was complex and had a certain behavior is now 
less complex and has a different behavior. 

Living things escape the fate of less complex compounds 
by holding their fate in their own hands to an extent denied 
inorganic things. Snowflake and bacterium “die” under a 
sun’s ray; an alga synthesizes protoplasm; a lizard crawls 


into the shade; a man hoists an umbrella. But one action 


is no more “explicable” than the other. 
92. 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH, LIFE, AND SEX 


The lizard’s energy is of a different type from that of the 
bacterium; it has a wider range, it can better adapt itself 
to its environment. But otherwise its vital processes, though 
of a higher order, must be of the same kind. 

Life, in any and all forms, to go on as life, must exchange 
matter and energy with its environment; it takes in food, 
excretes waste. 

The smallest known molecule—hydrogen—weighs a three- 
million-million-million-millionth of a gram. It travels a mile 
a second. Do chemistry and physics “resolve” it? An 
electron is smaller and travels faster. Is it less mysterious 
than a seed of mignonette? Why does a molecule of hydro- 
gen have only one kind of behavior, a molecule of oxygen 
two kinds, a molecule of carbon four kinds? Heredity? 
Why does one speck of protoplasm grow into mignonette, 
another into man? Heredity again. But always: matter, 
energy. The matter is differently combined, the energy 
comes from different sources. 

Thus, plants obtain such maiter as carbon dioxide, water, 
and mineral salts, from the air and soil. With the aid of 
energy (sunlight) they transform these into such other 
matter as sugar and oxygen. The oxygen returns to air 
and renews it. What becomes of the solar energy? Animals 
eat the sugar; within their body it is burned, setting free as 
muscular force and heat the energy the plant got from the 
sun. What becomes of the by-products? Eliminated by 
the animal as carbon dioxide and water: food fit for plants. 
The food goes round and round. 

Living matter does not produce something out of nothing, 
neither the matter of its own body nor the energy expended 
in building its body or in keeping it alive. Plants conserve 
energy, animals dissipate it. 

Nothing is destroyed, nothing lost. What is here has 
always been here, or gathered up from the dust of the 
universe. Energy from the sun changes matter, alters it, 
evolves it. Matter itself is indestructible; the energy itself 

. 93 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


is transformed, flows in but one direction. There is enough 
in the sun to keep earth and life going for untold millions 
of years. 

Untold millions of years ago, the sun’s rays were impelling 
forces as they are to-day. Under their influence, the facile 
carbon took on new and more complex forms as it built into 
its structure hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur, phosphorus, 
chlorine, sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium, and iron. 

This took time. But the times were ripe when water began 
to collect in pools, and there were shores. Circulation, at 
any rate, went on then. Evaporation made for clouds: water 
came from above; capillary attraction brought the waters 
up from below. Wet and dry seasons alternated. The 
elements favored concentrations and resolutions. All favor- 
able to colloidal growth, to fluent forms, and to pliancy. 

The development of colloids must have been as important 
in the building of life as were the organic compounds. Even 
early in the earth’s growth the organic compounds must 
have tended toward colloid rather than crystalline direction. 
Within limits, the colloid was more stable. Crystalloids were 
subject to dissolution; in solution, they contribute to the 
upbuilding of colloid capsules. 

Conceive of several units or globules of colloidal proto- 
plasm wrapped up in an envelope, and we have a bacterium. 
Add more protoplasm, rearrange the internal mechanism, and 
we have a plant cell. Increase the complexity of the internal 
mechanism, add more colloid globules, and we have an 
ameba. Give it a definite outer garment, and we have such 
cells as we are made of. 

A true cell differs from a bacterium in its greater com- 
plexity of structure and more stable dynamic process; it lives 
faster because it is better organized to take in what it needs 
and get rid of the husks. The animal cell has greater flexi- 
bility than the plant cell; it can travel as well as grow. 
It can live faster, spend more, and sleep less. Both differ 

94 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH, LIFE, AND SEX 


from a crystal in having a larger number of substances for 
chemical activities to organize. 

While the shape of living beings and crystals, says Loeb, 
is primarily determined by the chemical nature of their 
material, their mechanism of growth is different. Crystals 
grow, and even restore their old form when mutilated; but 
only in “supersaturated undercooled solutions of the mole- 
cules of which they are composed. Living cells grow in 
solutions of low concentrations of simpler compounds than 
those of which their cells are composed.”’ They grow because 
they synthesize large insoluble molecules from comparatively 
small soluble molecules. The crystal cannot organize in 
colloid form; it has no such substratum for dynamic changes. 

The nature of the earliest form of life we may never 
know. Of living organisms, bacteria are presumably the 
lowest, simplest, and most primitive. Sulphur bacteria obtain 
their energy by the oxidation of sulphuretted hydrogen to 
sulphuric acid; with that energy they fix nitrogen of the 
air and synthesize carbon compounds. We may speak of 
their energy as a bioelectric current; their growth, as electro- 
synthesis. They deal direct with inorganic matter. They are 
a link in organic evolution. Whatever life is, they had it. 
They made more complex bodies possible: lowest plants. 

The microscopic one-celled alge, through their green 
chlorophyl, began to store energy from sunlight. For this 
they needed only a cell membrane; inside which they fell 
“asleep in immobility.” 

The next step was the lowest animal, an organism so 
complex that it got its energy from plants. It was a new 
kind of power plant. But it had to go after the energy it 
put to work; the plant comes to the animal only as borne by 
the wind or water. 

Animal and plant evolution forked—one went one way, 
the other another. But animals had to know which way 
the plants went. | 

The first lesson animals had to learn was, ““Keep moving.” 

95 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


The key to their evolution is their specialized ways to find 
food and go to it, and to know and to avoid their enemies. 
Plants, on the other hand, were enjoined to keep their place 
in the sun. The green leaf is the key to their evolution; 
their interest in locomotion is chiefly confined to their seeds: 
these must meet their mates and be carried to suitable soil. 

The primitive animal cell had the world before it and 
could go where it liked, always provided it never ceased to 
function. It had to keep in touch with a commissary depart- 
ment. Life, as well as armies, travels on its belly. 

Some dug in, as the Sporozoa; some went in for speed, as 
the lively Infusoria; some just dragged around, as the ameba 
does. And these three types of primitive organisms are 
represented to-day by the encysted, ciliated, and ameboid 
cells of our body. 

Where the single-cell animals began to combine and pool 
their interests, the tree of life took on new capacities for 
growth. The sky was the limit—and the bee beat the lark 
to it. 

Both bee and lark are animated and have vital energy. 
And that is all there is to Animism and Vitalism. 

An ameba engulfs a diatom and casts out the shell. A 
drop of chloroform suspended in water engulfs a shellac- 
coated spicule of glass and casts out the spicule. Known 
laws of physics and chemistry suffice to describe both actions. 
But neither action can yet be fully described because not 
all is known of the energies involved in the two actions. 
More is known about the mechanism in which energy is 
manifested in the drop of chloroform than in the blob of 
protoplasm. It is known that the ameba is activated by 
forces from without, as is the drop of chloroform; not much 
4s yet known of the mechanism of the ameba by which it 
makes its response. The energies which move it are vital 
only because complex mechanisms, such as amebe and other 
living protoplasm, possess what is known as vitality, life. 
The rays which blister paint and my skin, dry up amebe, 

96 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH, LIFE, AND SEX 


and impel green leaves to synthesize carbon compounds, come 
from the same sun. These rays are forms of energy: they 
do things. They animate nature. When we stop eating that 
stored energy, we lose our stored vitality and soon become 
inanimate. 

The chemist can synthesize many organic molecules; he 
cannot yet synthesize a living protein molecule—he does not 
know its exact composition and architecture. If he could 
synthesize a living protein molecule, he could probably 
synthesize protoplasm and build a living cell. If he could 
build a living cell, there is no telling what he might not do, 
for, as Millikan says, when nature’s inner workings are once 
laid bare, man finds a way to put his brains inside the 
machine and drive it whither he will. 

In other words, we shall know how life evolved when we 
can evolve life. That day will probably come; it is yet a 
long way off. 

Facts of evolution, yes; by the million. Museums, 
libraries, and laboratories full of facts. But no one law 
yet propounded begins to fit all the facts. Two hypotheses 
have become famous and have passed into current literature; 
they have given rise to world-wide controversy. They did 
not describe evolution; they did serve mightily to open men’s 
minds to new views of life and wider conceptions of nature. 
Lamarck and Darwin will remain great names in the history 
of the science to which they gave their lives, but which was 
to develop into a real science of life only within the last 
few decades. 


aL 


A fundamental criterion of life is growth. The outstand- 
ing phenomena of life are universality and prodigality. The 
only line life knows is the food line. Nature seems to 
abhor a lifeless vacuum. Life abounds in deep seas, in hot 
springs, in ice-cold caves, on the eternal ice of glaciers. 
There are fish that climb trees, spiders that live under water. 

97 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


In a three-by-four-inch garden patch Darwin found twenty 
kinds of flowering plants. There are seven thousand million 
diatoms in a square yard of pond water. One Alpine glacier 
supports fifty million wingless insects of a single species. 
In one bucket of water there may be five million phos- 
phorescent microorganisms. A ship may plow through count- 
less millions of billions of them for hours. In a pinch of 
soil there may be twenty billion colloidal food particles 
supporting a hundred million bacteria, fourteen million fungi 
and alge, and five thousand protozoa. 

Life is a spendthrift breeder. Elephants are the slowest, 
yet Darwin calculated that one pair in 750 years would 
have 19,000,000 descendants. Australia has often told the 
world what one pair of rabbits can do. Fish are worse. 
A cod can lay 6,000,000 eggs; a ling, 28,000,000. Even 
the ling would be crowded out of the sea if just one oyster 
were let alone by all and sundry until it had great-great- 
grandchildren. If all survived, Lull says, there would 
be just 66,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 
oysters. Their shells would make a pile eight times the 
size of the earth! | 

Oysters only produce 60,000,000 eggs a year. A starfish 
produces over 200,000,000. But even a starfish’s progeny 
are but a drop in the bucket compared with the yield of 
one—not a pair, just one—paramecium. This animal, just 
visible to the naked eye, has been domesticated in a Yale 
laboratory by Woodruff. He studied its capacity to occupy 
the whole known universe: not our puny solar system, the 
universe. At the end of the 9,000th generation there would 
not be room for a star or a comet or a nebula in the sky. 
The universe would be solid paramecium. 

But the universe is not solid paramecium, nor have there 
ever been 19,000,000 elephants at large at any one time, 
nor can we travel from New York to Southampton on a road- 
bed of oyster shells. Why not? Because, in short, life is 
a fight. Which survive? 

98 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH, LIFE, AND SEX 


Here is where Darwin got his key to evolution. Nature 
herself decides; she selects. Natural Selection. 

But, does not like beget like? Are we not all created free 
and equal? Darwin knew better; as does every farmer. 
Animals breed true; but they vary. Peas in a pod vary. 
Rabbits of a litter vary. Identical twins vary. Without 
variation, there could be no evolution. Variation is the 
law of the universe. Living beings vary, the environment 
varies. There is overproduction, and a struggle for existence. 
In that struggle the fittest would survive. Harmful variations 
would be eliminated, beneficial characters intensified and 
modified; characters neither hurtful nor beneficial would 
persist through heredity. Man himself carries around two 
hundred characters he could dispense with, but which are 
not so unfit that nature weeds them out. 

There followed much talk of “survival” values and of 
“adaptations.” One marsupial “survives” because it is a 
jumper; another, because it is a sprinter; another, because 
it is a climber. One snake survives by turning a tooth into 
a hypodermic syringe, his saliva into venom; another keeps 
his teeth, but changes his skin to look like that of his poi- 
sonous brother; another parts with teeth entirely, and devel- 
ops a spine in his gullet to break birds’ eggs. He is “‘adapted” 
for climbing. 

Remove the “adaptations” from a whale, there is nothing 
left. Some whales have big teeth in big jaws and a gullet 
big enough for a Jonah.. Their equally big cousins have 
no teeth and a gullet so small they must strain their food 
through a whalebone sieve. They are “right” because the 
right kind to yield lots of blubber and whalebone. 

Milton’s whale, that ‘“‘at his gills draws in, and at his trunk 
spouts out, a sea,” would be an “adaptation”! Especially 
if its young were born alive and took nourishment from 
mammary glands, as all whales do. Whales have no “gills,” 
no “trunk.” They are perfectly good mammals, as mammal 

99 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


as bat, giraffe, or man. Why did they go back on their 
country and go in for aquatics? Why are some whales as 
gentle as turtledoves, others as mean as sharks? Why are 
there Negritos and Nordics? Natural selection must work 
overtime to answer these questions. 

What kind of variation may we expect to find in a land- 
lubber that takes to water and adapts one branch of its family 
to fight sharks and another branch to live on nothing that 
would not pass through a finger ring? Did you ever try 
to catch food in your mouth and swallow it, fifty feet under 
water? Any whale can. The first whale that tried that trick 
drowned: it transmitted nothing, not even a taste for salt 
water. Think of the “adaptations” a whale had to part 
with to become adapted to water. 

De Vries, a Dutch botanist, suggested the mutation theory 
as a way out. Life does not always vary by slight change, 
but sometimes by jumps. Breeders call them “sports.” 
Perhaps the first tailless ape was a sport. Perhaps man 
himself is. 

But can the “sport” hand on the essence of its change? 
For example, a human sport with four toes can found no 
four-toed dynasty unless the four-toedness is a transmissible 
trait. Again, the trait which characterizes the sport may 
have no “survival” value; it may even prove a handicap in 
the struggle for existence. In either case, it will lead to no 
permanent change. It is difficult to see how the mutation 
theory can work, apart from natural selection. 

Some variations are “predetermined”: they are inherent 
in the developing egg. Or they may be “acquired” after 
birth, called out by outside influence. They may be “chance” 
variations, subject to no known law; such are the variations 
“selected” according to the Darwinian law. Or they may 
be “orthogenetic,” as Osborn calls them: they seem to point 
in some definite direction. Most variations are “continuous” 
and of slight quantity: these also enter into the Darwinian 

100 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH, LIFE, AND SEX 


calculation. Or they may be “discontinuous”: of large 
quantity, the “mutants” of De Vries. Some books on evolu- 
tion abound in such jargon. It gets us no nearer to the 
cause of variation. 

After the first shock, people began to like Darwin “afl 
his fittest doctrine. “Survival of the Fittest! Aren’t we 
here? We are the fittest! Darwin says so.” Many O. K.’d 
Darwin without knowing that merely to be alive under domes- 
tication is no proof of fitness, mental, moral, or physical. 
When they realized that they could not count on Darwin for 
a Personal Fitness certificate, they lost interest in evolution 
and blamed Darwin for having taken them in. And 
grounded their blame on the monstrous proposition that 
Darwin sought to drive God from the world! 

Darwin himself would have been the last soul in the world 
to do such a thing. He had no wish to disturb anyone’s 
religious beliefs. On the contrary, knowing that the pub- 
lication of his findings would challenge the Mosaic cos- 
mogony, he held back for twenty years and did not publish 
until he was actually anticipated by Wallace. And then he 
said he felt like a murderer! But no scientist ever less 
deserved the reproach of the Church. Nor does it become 
the physicist, L. T. More, even in “trying to vindicate the 
belief in our spiritual nature,” to bear false witness against 
Darwin, as he does in his Dogma of Evolution, just issued 
by the Princeton University Press. Darwin died as he had 
lived, a Christian gentleman. 

Darwin did not discover evolution, but he so presented 
the facts of and the case for evolution that the world believed. 
In the fact that Darwin and Lincoln had a common birthday 
(February 12, 1809), Lull sees Darwin as an “emancipator 
. of human minds from the shackles of slavery to tradition,” 
as Lincoln was the “emancipator of human bodies from a 
no more real physical bondage.” His nobleness of character 
and generosity of disposition were not less than Lincoln’s. 

101 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


12 


“All that has been acquired or altered in the organization 
of individuals during their life is preserved by generation 
and transmitted to new individuals which proceed from those 
which have undergone change,” said Lamarck, a great French 
naturalist who died nearly one hundred years ago, blind, in 
poverty, a social outcast—for telling the truth as he saw 
it! He coined the word “biology”; it thrives. Biologists 
have driven a hundred daggers into his theory of evolution 
through the Inheritance of Acquired Characters; the theory 
is as alive as ever! 

To find out if “acquired characters” could be inherited, 
thousands of animals were mutilated; Weismann himself cut 
off mice’s tails for twenty-two generations! They gave it up, 
realizing, as Conklin puts it, that wooden legs are not inher- 
ited, but wooden heads may be. | 

I may “acquire” such development of the muscles of my 
breast and abdomen that I can dance the “hootchy-kootchy”’; 
that is one thing. To have those muscles cut out is something 
else, certainly not an “‘acquired” trait. The marvel is that 
Weismann’s silly experiment ever got into print as experi- 
mental “‘evidence’’ that there is nothing to Lamarck’s theory 
of evolution. 

“Every animal climbs up its own genealogical tree,” says 
Thomson. But that no more disproves Lamarck’s theory 
than Weismann’s mice that were born with tails. If an 
animal never takes the first step, it can never take the second. 
Nothing added to zero gets nowhere; adding more zeros adds 
nothing; nor climbs any genealogical tree. Something gets 
added. Otherwise nature could not have made a man out of 
a monkey or a mammal out of a reptile. 

Novelties do get into life. Spinal column, prehensile taal 
blue eyes, were once novelties. There was a time when there 
was no such thing as spine, tail, or eye, in any living being. 
To say, as Davenport seems to, that they are not really 

102 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH, LIFE, AND SEX 


inherited but persist because parent and offspring are “chips 
from the same old block,” is to make the same “old block” 
a Pandora’s box. 

Man’s arm, bat’s wing, horse’s leg, whale’s flipper, bird’s 
wing, and turtle’s paddle, all evolved from the fin of a fish. 
These are typical ‘“‘adaptations”; they are characters which 
have been acquired; whether “inherited” or not, they are 
transmitted. 

But they cannot be transmitted, said Weismann, because 
the germ-plasm is sacred, immortal, and continuous; nothing 
can get at it, nothing can touch it. Tennyson’s immortal 
brook had nothing on Weismann’s germ-plasm. But that 
brook does become a river; and somehow, some way, a piece 
of the original life-germ, or germs, has come to be a human 
being. 

Biologically, immortality is a figure of speech, but based 
on certain facts, namely: all living things grow, and if they 
cannot grow young they grow old and die. Whatever 
“immortality” is, then, it involves the process of either 
remaining young or of growing young, “rejuvenescence.” 
Later, we shall see how man and higher animals renew their 
youth. 

Weismann’s doctrine of the “continuity of the germ- 
plasm” held sway for three decades, and still furnishes texts 
for well-meaning enthusiasts who have a case to prove. It 
is an especially useful ingredient in eugenic and _ political 
pies. But as we shall see, there is nothing sacred about the 
germ-plasm, nor is it alone allowed an immortal heritage. 
Body cells also are potentially immortal. “Immortality” — 
for germ-cells, for soma cells, for all living organisms-—is 
contingent upon an inherited mechanism and upon physical 
and chemical conditions of environment. 

The old formule do not suffice to explain the facts of 
evolution. The facts have outgrown the old theories. Evolu- 
tion is up and down, back and forth; a circulating, pulsating, 
inextricably woven web. 

103 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


We see life in fragments. Fragments, individuals, arise 
by fission or reproduction from pre-existing individuals. 
Each individual must be “adapted” to get food and oxygen. 
Each individual strives to occupy the earth—as does oxygen 
or hydrogen; in this it adapts itself to diverse conditions, 
or it dies. Evolution proceeded not on one but on several 
lines. The main lines led to food and oxygen, self-protection, 
reproduction. 

There are two great problems: how have individuals 
become adapted to the conditions in which we find them? 
Natural Selection seems to have been the limiting factor. 
How have their organs become adapted to the functions they 
perform? The Inheritance of Acquired Characters seems to 
have been the decisive factor. 

The great problem Darwin tried to solve was the origin 
of species. There are species. Man is a species. ‘The 
gorilla is a species. How species arose is, after all, only 
the problem of inheritance, of heredity, of individual varia- 
tion, writ large. The more this problem is examined, the 
less simple it seems. It is far from solved. Segregation is 
an important factor; inbreeding tends to swamp variation. 

Probably no one law can be formulated which will ade- 
quately describe the processes of evolution. It is obvious 
that if an animal is not fit to survive it will perish, and that 
if there were no variations there would be no evolution. 
Selection does work on variations—in nature as in Wall 
Street; but as time goes on we shall probably hear less and 
less of selection, variation, adaptation, etc., and more and 
more of the nature of the physico-chemical mechanism which 
exhibits living behavior under livable conditions. Under 
such conditions living things do certain things, show a certain 
capacity for a certain range of behavior. One of the striking 
features of that range of behavior is the power to grow. In 
fact, nothing so characterizes livingness as its capacity for 
reproduction. This is so great in lower animals that they 
are conceived of as endowed with immortality. With higher 

104 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH, LIFE, AND SEX 


animals “immortality” becomes a special affair of the so- 
called germ-cells. 


I3 


The very lowest organisms have nothing comparable to 
sex. Woodruff’s one-celled paramecium is in its 10,000th 
generation. If each generation equaled man’s, his original 
paramecium would now be well over a quarter of a million 
years old. Yet it remains eternally young and shows no loss 
of virility. As fast as one paramecium tires of existence it 
renews its youth by becoming two, “which go on playing 
the fascinating game of living here and now.” 

Some protozoa show the beginnings of sex. Two indi- 
viduals unite (conjugate) to become one; nuclear material 
is exchanged and divided: one becomes two again and these 
two grow and divide. Conjugation is evidently a rejuvenation 
process. Other protozoa only partially unite—and again 
separate, “rejuvenated.” In other species, a small individual 
bores into and buries its body within that of a normal-sized 
individual; the latter then divides repeatedly. 

Thus far there is no division of labor or true sex forms. 
When two unite the conjugation is an energy stimulus, as 
though the spring of life needed rewinding. In higher organ- 
isms, this rewinding becomes the prime function of the 
sperm-cell. 

In volvox, a high protozoon, thousands of cells held 
together by protoplasmic threads unite into a colony. When 
the colony is full-grown, certain cells become engorged with 
food and are of great size. These big cells now divide into 
many small cells, break away from the parent colony, and 
form a little colony of their own, where they grow to full 
size. 

But in some volvox colonies, certain cells may divide and 
form bundles of cells of rod-like bodies with whip-lash tails. 
One of these now conjugates with a cell of the other type; 

105 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


this then divides and founds a new colony. The cells of 
the colony which were not concerned in reproduction live 
awhile longer, and die. 

Natural death had appeared. Also germ-cells: egg-cells; 
sperm-cells. The idea of male and female began with a 
volvox colony of protozoa. 

The egg-cells of the volvox colony were large; the sperm- 
cells, minute. This disproportion in size holds good for the 
entire animal kingdom. The mammal spermatozoon may be 
only 1/100,000th part as large as the barely-visible-to-the- 
naked-eye ovum. 

_ One volvox colony may produce both ova and sperma, or 

only ova, or only sperma. The volvox, therefore, is either 
unisexual or hermaphroditic—it is neither male nor female. 
As the ova themselves can form complete colonies without 
the need of fertilization, the volvox is also parthenogenetic 
(virgin-reproduction). In short, volvox, as Geddes says, is 
an “epitome of the evolution of sex.” 

Many lower metazoa are so small that only with the 
microscope can males be distinguished from females. There 
is no mating, no sex complex. Ova and sperma are turned 
loose to find each other as best they may; for every ovum 
there are tens of thousands of sperma. 

Higher in the scale, sex distinctions tend to be more pro- 
nounced, but the evolution of sex forms does not follow a 
straight line. Sometimes the sexual differences are unnotice- 
ably slight; sometimes they reach absurd and amazing forms. 
The difference between certain spider males and females is 
equivalent to a man of normal size married to an eighty-foot- 
high woman weighing a hundred tons. The female of one 
species of worms is a hundred times larger than the male; 
he lives in her oviduct as a parasite. 

Difference between the two sexes is most conspicuous in 
birds. But in rooks, kingfishers, and some parrots, there 
are no secondary sex characters. Even many mammals show 
none or almost none: mice, rabbits, cats. In vertebrates as 

106 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH, LIFE, AND SEX 


a whole, conspicuous sexual differences are the exception; 
in the entire animal kingdom similarity is the rule. 

Now from this brief résumé of the history of sex let us see 
what is back of it. Are sex and fertilization primary attri- 
butes of life? 

After years of study Woodruff concludes that “the proto- 
plasm of a single cell may be self-sufficient to reproduce 
itself indefinitely, under favorable environmental conditions, 
without recourse to conjugation.” In other words, the union 
of two cells, or two organisms, is not the essential element 
of new cells or organisms. Proper environment alone is 
enough to enable the paramecium to reorganize its nucleus 
and continue dividing indefinitely. 

More suggestive is the behavior of simple planarian flat- 
worms, studied for years by Child with interesting results. 
Life processes in planaria are naturally highest at the head 
and diminish toward the tail. Cut one into three pieces: the 
head part grows a tail, the tail grows a head. Normally, 
a head will grow at the end of the middle piece which was 
toward the head, a tail at the other end. But Child can 
reverse this! He can so alter the life process that a head 
will grow out from the tail end, a tail from the head end. 
The net result is the same: from one old worm, three new 
worms. With no more “conjugation” or “fertilization” than 
a scalpel. 

What happens when the professor is not looking? At the 
end of the season the old planaria break into bits. In the 
spring, each bit grows into a new worm. 

“Germ-cells” are not unlike these bits of worms; they 
are not young but old cells. They become young by union. 
In other words, the whole theory of the need of sexed parents 
for carrying on the spark of life breaks up with planaria. 
Even the theory of the need of special germ-cells to carry 
on, falls flat. Any group of planarian body-cells is the 
potential bearer of immortality. 

107 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


Loeb “fertilized” a frog’s egg with a hatpin. Delage had 
already found that starfish and other marine metazoa could 
yet along without fathers. Eggs could not only be fertilized 
with various chemicals, but the developing embryos could 
be turned this way or that, or checked in growth at different 
stages, or be made to assume monstrous forms, or become 
twins. With tannin and ammonia he not only “fertilized” 
starfish eggs, but grew one with six rays—nature allows them 
but five. 

Among mammals, fertilization of ova from one species by 
sperms from a closely allied species occurs. The hybrid 
mule is sterile, but the-hybrid offspring of a bull and a 
buffalo is fertile. In lower vertebrates, and especially among 
invertebrates, there are innumerable cases, according to Mar- 
shall, where the sperms of one species can fertilize the ova 
of alice species. 

Riddle’s ringdove that laid Sleven eggs and then began 
to behave like a male, and was found, after an autopsy, to 
have lost her ovaries through tuberculosis and to have devel- 
oped male sex-glands instead, seems to indicate that neither 
structure nor behavior has a fixed and uncontrollable basis 
in heredity. The germ-cell chromosomes, or whatever it is 
that makes for hereditary characters, can be modified and 
even reversed. 

For example, food may cause great change in structure. 
Tadpoles fed on thymus gland become big, dark tadpoles— 
but never develop into frogs; if fed adrenal gland, they 
become very light in color. Larvee of bees fed royal jelly 
become queens; on bee bread, unfertile females or workers. 
Canaries fed on sweet red pepper become red in color. The 
germ as the “bearer of heredity” is meaningless or monstrous 
apart from its usual environment. 

The egg is the parent of the chicken, and of more eggs. 
What these eggs will develop into depends on many hitherto 
unsuspected factors; as yet almost beyond control because 

108 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH, LIFE, AND SEX 


so little known. But among these factors is physical and 
chemical environment. 

A male element, as represented either by one of two 
similar conjugating cells or by a distinctive sperm which 
“fertilizes,” is not a necessary factor in the reproduction of 
life. But in truly bisexual animals fertilization is a life- 
saving act, as Loeb calls it; if the germs are not fertilized, 
they die. Fertilization also seems to be essential for 
biparental inheritance. 

No father, no inheritance from the father’s side. Bisexual 
reproduction made variation possible. Variation is newness. 
Newness began with life when life was one-celled. That one 
cell was both germ and body cell combined. It gradually 
surrendered its functions to daughter cells. Some developed 
capacities to high degrees; they are fit only for detailed, 
specialized work. Some remained close to the primitive 
_ original form. Groups of such primitive cells can renew 
their vigor and begin anew. 

But in the complex mechanisms of higher vertebrates, the 
function of propagation came to be reserved for certain 
cells. At the same time the struggle for life became keener. 
The male element was a useful mechanism for novelties: it 
doubled the chance for variation, it made it possible for the 
organism to acquire something new. If the something new 
was harmful, nature “selected” it for death. 

The first business of sex, then, was to put new energy 
into life, to release life, to keep it young and flowing. Sex 
thus appears as one of the many adaptations whereby living 
beings could become more highly organized and so carry on 
on a higher scale. The development of special organs for 
reproduction is comparable to the development of special 
organs for digestion, for respiration, etc. It was not until 
evolution was well advanced that the sperm or male element 
assumed a share in the burden of heredity. This assumption 
was a great step in the evolution of higher organisms. 

109 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


14 


A fragment cut from a single-celled animal can move, but 
cannot grow unless it contains part of the nucleus of the 
animal. Every living cell (except red blood-cells) of every 
living body, and every body of one cell, has a dense central 
part, called a nucleus. No one knows just what the nucleus 
is, but it is the essential part of all cells. A one-thirtieth 
part of a sea-urchin’s egg will live, grow, and develop into 
a complete sea-urchin, if that thirtieth part contains a portion 
of the nucleus. That thirtieth part of an egg is germ-plasm. 
Any protoplasm is germ-plasm if it can grow a new 
individual. 

Ordinarily, cells divide by what is known as direct 
division—a constriction appears at the middle of the cell, 
increasing until finally the cell separates into two distinct 
cells. But in fertilized ova, the division is indirect or mitotic 
(thread-like). 

As the nucleus seems to be the vital spot of the germ, and 
as a certain part of it stains beautifully and so looms up 
under the microscope, it is called chromatin (colored stuf). 
No germ-cell divides until this chromatin performs. At first 
a mere network, the chromatin becomes a long, continuous, 
tangled skein. Then it breaks into bits, or units, called 
chromosomes (colored bodies) ; they are always the same in 
each species and vary in number from two to several hun- 
dreds—six in mosquitoes, sixteen in rats, twenty-four in 
mice, forty-eight in man, etc. Further, these units assume 
definite shapes in different species, and are always in pairs. 

Just outside the nucleus is a small granule called the 
centrosome. While the chromatin is taking its definite thread 
shape, the centrosome divides into two, which migrate to 
opposite sides of the ovum. Meanwhile, the nuclear wall 
disappears and its fluid mingles freely with the surrounding 
protoplasm. From each centrosome spindles radiate out 
toward the center of the cell. At this equator and to the ends 

110 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH, LIFE, AND SEX 


of the spindles the chromosomes now arrange themselves; 
and divide—each chromosome splits lengthwise and becomes 
two! The two sets of chromosomes now begin to withdraw 
from each other toward the centrosomes. 

Meanwhile, the round ovum begins to lengthen, then begins 
to constrict at the equator. The chromosomes begin to 
increase in size until each becomes as big as the parent 
chromosome. The spindle fibers disappear. A wall begins 
to form around the chromosomes. The cell’s equator has 
grown smaller; it is an hour-glass form. It breaks in two. 
The one ovum has become two cells. The chromosomes 
again become mere chromatin, vaguely seen in the dense 
mass of the nucleus, for the surrounding wall is now 
complete. | 

What was one is now two, each complete: blob of proto- 
plasm, nucleus, everything. The most wonderful thing in 
the world. It is potentially a full-grown animal, complete 
unto itself. All it needs is food and safety. 

That is the way we grew up: one cell became two, two 
became four, four... 

The oocytes from which ova develop, and the spermato- 
gonia which become sperms, are present at the time of birth. 
Although they are among the last of the cells of the body to 
mature, they are set aside early in embryonic development. 
The big difference between sperm and ovum is size and 
behavior. The ovum has much protoplasm and no means 
of locomotion. The sperm is all nucleus—except its long 
tail of cytoplasm, as protoplasm outside the nucleus is called. 
By this whip-lash tail it travels. 

Before the parent sperm and ovum unite, they go through 
a maturation or ripening process whereby the number of 
chromosomes in each germ-cell is cut in two. The fertilized 
human ovum thus starts with the original number of chromo- 
somes—forty-eight, half being contributed by each parent 
germ-cell. The maturation process is in general like that 
of ordinary division by mitosis. But the chromosomes unite 

| lll 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


in pairs; thus, one of each paired unit passes to each cell 
formed by the division. 

During fertilization the head and “middle piece” of the 
sperm enter the ovum, the head being equivalent to the 
divided nucleus of an ordinary cell in process of mitosis. 
The middle piece becomes the centrosome—in maturing, the 
ovum lost its own centrosome. It is this new centrosome that 
divides as above described, each new body taking position 
as in ordinary mitosis. The chromatin of the two nuclei 
now splits into chromosomes, etc. What was a fertilized 
ovum is two cells. The development of a rat, an elephant, 
or a human being, has begun. 

The fertilized human ovum has forty-eight chromosomes, 
twenty-four from each parent germ. Here is where heredity 
is supposed to get in its work, and Mendel’s law is supposed 
to preside over the cutting of the inheritance. 


15 


We all inherit something, if only crooked legs or a 
tendency to twins. And we all have ancestors: in fact, a 
surprising number if they had not intermarried. Reckoning 
three generations to a century, each of us to-day is entitled 
to 120,000,000,000,000 lineal ancestors in A. D. 1. They 
intermarried. At no time has this earth seen 120,000,000,000 
people, much less 120,000,000,000,000. Kaiser Wilhelm 
had 162 ancestors ten generations ago—he was entitled to 
012. All Anglo-Saxons are at least thirtieth cousins. 

We have ancestors. We inherit features, traits, characters, 
peculiarities—marks of individuality whereby each of us is 
not only a separate entity, but different in detail from every 
other individual on earth. 

How do we get these traits? What traits are heritable, 
what are not? The game of heredity was evolved to answer 
these questions. The game presupposes a knowledge of 
germ-cell division, a speaking acquaintance with chromo: 

1b be 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH, LIFE, AND SEX 


somes, the assumption that they are made up of countless 
distinct and definite chromomeres, and faith in two theories— 
germ-plasm, eternal and inviolable; chromomeres, the “ulti- 
mate” bearers of heredity. Thomson recommends also two 
ordinary packs of playing cards from which the kings have 
been removed. Why kings is not explained. Each is now 
a short deck—forty-eight cards. How many chromosomes in 
the human body? Forty-eight. 

We inherit twenty-four maternal and twenty-four paternal 
chromosomes: possible permutations, 16,777,216. That is 
nothing. That only refers to possible permutations for one 
single specific pair of individual germs. Counting potential 
germ capacity for the life of one pair of parents gives us 
the tidy range of total possible different combinations in all 
the fertilizable ova as 300,000,000,000,000. 

Now imagine that we deal not with a mere forty-eight- 
chromosome permutation system, but with forty-eight chromo- 
somes each consisting of “countless” chromomeres, each a 
possible bearer of heredity! In that case, as Thomson says, 
every human germ-cell would be “absolutely unique’”—and 
undoubtedly is. 

Some biologists play this game because they feel impelled 
to have a frame on which they can hang heredity. They are 
not agreed as to what heredity is. But there are the “colored 
bodies.” They do not know what they are. All right. Hang 
heredity on them. Solve the mystery by multiplying it by 
forty-eight unknowns. 

What is heredity? Heredity is germ-plasm. How does 
heredity work? By the beads on the thread of chromatin. 
Maybe. Maybe heredity counts its beads: one bead for 
each generation. ‘The question is: does this- hypothesis get 
us farther into life than Darwin’s ‘“‘gemmules” or Weismann’s 
“biophores”? I do not see that it does. It does seem to 
get us in deeper. 

Now for the “traits.” Are you a female? It is a “Men- 
delian” trait. Are you bald-headed? See Mendel. Are 

113 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


your fingers all thumbs? “Mendelian” dominance. Daven- 
port, specialist in heredity, no longer finds anything mys- 
terious in the sudden appearance of atavistic characters. We 
are full of such “grandpa” characters: they are “latent”; 
they appear according to Mendel’s law of heredity. Mendel 
would be surprised if he could come back! 

Gregor Mendel was a monk, lived in a cloister, taught 
school, and had a hobby—garden peas. He died in 1884 
at the age of sixty-two, and was promptly forgotten. What 
he found out about peas and buried in a little article in 
1866 was not discovered until 1900—the world had been 
too busy with Darwin. What this discovery started is still 
going. Mendel is less abused to-day than Darwin; some 
think he made a greater discovery. He certainly is a cult. 

Walter thus formulates Mendel’s “law”: “When parents 
that are unlike with respect to any character are crossed, 
the progeny of the first generation will be like the dominant 
parent with respect to the character in question. When the 
hybrid offspring of this first generation are crossed with 
each other, they will produce a mixed progeny: 25 per cent 
will be like the dominant grandparent; 25 per cent like the 
other grandparent; 50 per cent like the parents resembling 
the dominant grandparent.” 

And plenty of stuffed mice and guinea-pig martyrs-to- 
science in museum cases prove that Mendel’s law works. It 
stands on three legs: 

1. Independent unit characters. While we inherit a gen- 
eral plan of structure, we inherit details, or traits, as ‘‘inde- 
pendent units.” 

2. Dominance. Brown eyes marry blue: offspring all 
brown-eyed. Brown is a positive character, dominant; blue 
is negative, “recessive.” By the fact of its dominance, brown 
appears. The blue may be present in the germ-plasm, but 
as long as the “determiner” is also present, blue will be 
unable to show itself. “Unit” characters are inherited 
through “determiners” in the germ-plasm. 

i14 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH, LIFE, AND SEX 


3. Segregation, or purity of the germ-cells. A sperm cell 
or an ovum can have only one of two “alternating char- 
acters.” For example, either blue-eyed or brown, but not 
both. Cross a blue-eyed with a brown-eyed: the fertilized 
ovum will contain both blue and brown units; the offspring 
will be brown-eyed; brown is the determiner. But half this 
offspring’s germ-cells will possess the blue-eyed unit; half, 
the brown-eyed; no one germ-cell will have both. The “alter. 
nating” characters will have been segregated. 

This segregation of alternate characters was Mendel’s chief 
point. The way the chromosomes divide in the maturing 
germ-cell seemed a good machine to try it on. Investigators 
began to count chromosomes, and on each hang a “unit” 
character. As there were more “units” than chromosomes, 
they postulated chromomeres. As these could not be seen 
and so checked up, they could postulate as many as they 
wanted. 

But experiments show much conflict, nor are experimenters 
agreed as to results or general conclusions. They can rarely 
know, if ever, whether the stock is “pure,” a hybrid, or a 
blend. New “‘Mendelian” factors have been added: “com- 
plementary,” “‘supplementary,” “‘inhibitory,” “cumulative,” 
“lethal.” “Units” may be “independent” as to quality or 
as to quantity; or a unit may function by being “absent”! 
A “dominant” character that performed true to form for 
three generations practically gave up in the seventh genera- 
tion; showing a discrepancy between man’s and nature’s idea 
of “dominance.” There seems often no real stability in the 
parent type. On cross-mating it breaks down; the component 
characters recombine into different or new types. 

If man bred as fast as mice and guinea-pigs, we should 
know more about our own Mendelian “units” than we do 
now. Enough is known, however, to support a Eugenics 
Society. Its motto is: When in doubt, marry a dissimilar; 
you may thereby skip a generation with a wooden head. 

115 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


16 


Can we control our own evolution? Do we want to? To 
what end? In which direction? Presumably we could; and 
this is as far as eugenics has any standing in a court of 
science. All the rest of eugenics is politics—based on 
assumptions open to opposite views or on race prejudice pure 
and simple. 

Man could probably breed a race of human beings with 
the following “traits”: -bald, fat, long chest, short and 
crooked legs, left-handed, six-fingered and all fingers thumbs 
and webbed, near-sighted, deaf and dumb, feeble-minded, 
curly haired, cataract, albino, long-lived, and prolific, with 
a tendency to twins; at any rate, these are a few of the many 
so-called Mendelian traits capable of transmission. There 
are said to be at least thirty-four different hereditary eye 
defects alone, eight of which can produce blindness. 

With nothing more to work with than normal variation in 
wild rock pigeons, man has bred over twenty races of pigeons. 
What could he not do with the human race if ...! The 
“if” introduces politics. And to “breed” a race of humans 
involves a decision as to what is desirable; a thousand-year- 
long dynasty of cast-iron despots with such power over sub- 
jects as Herod never hoped for or breeder of slaves dared 
exercise. 

What are we to breed at? What is the new race to go in 
for? Stature, tow hair, blue eyes, eight fingers, toothless, one 
toe, fecundity, mental precocity? The list of heritable traits 
is indefinite. “Marry dissimilars” is probably good eugenic 
advice if we are not bent on handing down our own personal 
traits—but most people are satisfied with their traits. At 
any rate, the sex impulse itself generally chooses its mate, 
and that impulse is not primarily concerned in offspring. 

Take stature. If height is the criterion for desirable citi- 
zens, early-and-often marriage should be encouraged in Iowa, 
Kentucky, and Missouri; made late and rare in New York, 

116 


THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH, LIFE, AND SEX 


Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts; and prohibited in Rhode 
Island. Meanwhile, close Ellis Island to all but native Pata- 
gonians. 

What shall we do with the Attic Greeks? Raise. their 
“quota,” or exclude them because they do not look like the 
Harvard graduate who fathers an average of only three. 
fourths of a son and the Vassar graduate who mothers one- 
half of a daughter? 

If there is anything in the “continuity of the germ-plasm”’ 
theory, there should be some good germs left in a country 
which in 150 years produced such statesmen as Miltiades, 
Themistocles, Aristides, and Pericles; such poets as Aes- 
chylus, Euripides, and Sophocles; such scientists as Socrates, 
Plato, and Aristotle; such artists as Phidias and Praxiteles; 
such historians as Thucydides and Xenophon; such orators as 
Aeschines, Demosthenes, and Lysias. The whole earth, in no 
centuries before or since, declared Galton, produced such a 
galaxy of illustrious men. 

Some of that germ-plasm may be blacking boots to-day 
on a Staten Island ferry or running a short-order restaurant 
in El Reno. Who knows? One thing is certain: if it is, it 
is more interested in a short shine or a long order than it 
is in eugenics. 

Could anyone, even Francis Galton himself, from the hill 
behind Athens in the year 600 B. c., have predicted that within 
a hundred years the little Rhode-Island-sized state of Attica 
would begin to bud genius so fast and so big that the world 
has not stopped wondering about it yet? 

Could Galton have predicted Lincoln? Could Ellis Island? 
Can Ellis Island spot the Jukes from the Altmans, or have the 
faintest idea when it holds up a Steinmetz—or an Edward 
Bok? 

The Jukes case is notorious—and illuminating, and was 
thoroughly investigated by Davenport. The case began about 
150 years ago with a lazy, mentally defective “Max” who 
settled not far from New York City. His two sons married 

117 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


into a family of six sisters, all harlots. One of them was 
known as ‘“‘Margaret, the mother of criminals.” 

Of the 2,094 progeny of the Jukes acler 1,258 were liv- 
ing in 1915: 65 were “‘sood citizens’; 600 were feeble- 
minded and epileptic. “Criminal,” “harlot,” “mentally de- 
fective,” “drunkard,” “pauper,” recur in their records again 
and again; now and then, “murderer.” In seventy-five years 
alone, Max’s feeble-minded pauper progeny cost New York 
State a million and a quarter of dollars. 

Looks like a plain case—segregation or a surgeon. And 
yet a Jukes’s descendant may be a governor and several of 
them may be in Congress.. Some say they are. Conceivably, 
a Jukes might become a second Pasteur—and save more lives 
than were lost in the World War. This is certain: the state 
or nation which permits marriage between mental defectives 
and deaf mutes will have to provide for deaf mutes and 
feeble-minded. We may improve the breed of figs and eradi- 
cate thistles, but never will we gather figs from thistles or 
good figs from poor fig stock. 

What carries eugenics into politics is that the Jukes are 
neither figs nor thistles, and we do not yet know just how 
feeble a mind has to be before it has to be locked up to pro- 
tect those who have minds and refuse to use them. 

Many Jukes have too much brain to be segregated, not 
enough to carry a rifle to the front. Selection. That kind 
of selection is a modern specialty. The sound-minded able- 
' bodied get shot, the priests and scholars will not marry, and 
the ambitious women and the selfish men transmit their 
names but not their germs. 

Is civilization now breeding a “pure” Andy Gump type— 
no teeth, no lower jaw? Cigarettes may save the lower lip, 
and chewing gum may save enough of the lower jaw to sup- 
port a chewing gum. But a full and sound set of teeth these 
days is about as primitive as is a perforated olecranon fossa 
of the humerus. 

Natural selection is always at work. In every million 

118 


THE rVOLUTION OF THE EARTH, LIFE, AND SEX 


births, not counting stillborns, there are 2,687 deaths the 
first year from. congenital malformation. A certain other 
small percentage who can never be happy or useful, are 
nursed along for a varying number of years. This fraction 
is undoubtedly larger in civilized than in natural conditions; 
it is probably increasing. It offers a social and biologic 
problem. That problem is not likely to be solved in the near 
future because we have too many abstract formule about 
humanity and too little common sense for solving concrete 
social problems. 

But the “racial purity” and the “racial inferiority” behind 
such books as McDougall’s Js America Safe for Democracy? 
Chamberlain’s Foundations of Nineteenth Century Civiliza- 
tion; Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race; Wiggam’s The 
New Decalogue of Science; Gould’s America a Family 
Matter; and East’s Mankind at the Crossroads, are bunk pure 
and simple. If these United States wish to restrict immigra- 
tion to “Nordics” or to this or that political group, why not 
say so and be done with it? To bolster up racial prejudice 
or a Nordic or a Puritan complex by false and misleading 
inferences drawn from “intelligence tests” or from pseudo- 
biology and ethnology, is to throw away science and fall back 
on the mentality of primitive savagery. 

Evolution produced a human brain, our only remarkable 
inheritance. Nothing else counts. Body is simply brain’s 
servant. Treat the body right, of course; no brain can func- 
tion well without good service. But why worry more about 
the looks, color, and clothes of the servant than the service it 
performs? 


119 


CHAPTER III 


THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


1. Life Is Change and Requires Energy. 2. The Body Is a Living Machine. 
3. It Requires Calories. 4. Why We Must Digest Food. 5. The Digestive 
System. 6. Our Daily Bread and Water. 7. Seeing Food Through the Canal. 
& How Food is Absorbed. 9. The Flesh Is in the Blood. 10. How the 
“Flesh” Js Transported. 11. Giving the Blood the Air. 12. The Great Blood 
Purifier. 13. The Red Blood-Cells. 14. The Body Thermostat. 15. The Réle 
of the Duct Glands. 16. The “Little Fleas.” 17. The Deadly Germs. 


I 


Au change implies resistance overcome, work done, en- 
ergy. Energy is ability to work. Without energy there is 
no work done or change in any living being. Change in liv- 
ing beings takes many forms. Growth, maintenance, repair, 
regulation, secretion, chemical synthesis, muscular activity, 
contraction and relaxation, heat production—all these are 
changes, living processes. They require energy. 

Energy required for engines is stored in fuel—organic 
compounds such as coal, wood, oil, etc. Energy used for 
life processes is also stored in fuel—organic compounds fed 
into the body as sugars and fats. Most of our food is physio- 
logical fuel. This fuel is “burned” in the body, releasing 
energy. This burning is called oxidation. Our vitality can 
be measured by the rate of oxidation. When oxidation ceases, 
animation ceases. Even individual cells die when deprived 
of oxygen. In dividing cells the rate of oxidation is speeded 
up. 
Oxidation is a chemical change and takes place only under 
certain conditions, temperature, etc. During oxidation heat 
is released, as it is every time we bat an eye, lift a finger, or 

120 


THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


think; batting an eye, lifting a finger, and thinking are forms 
of work, energy-consuming processes. 

What is oxidation? It can be seen in a furnace; it has 
never been seen in a living organism. But during oxidation 
something becomes something else, presumably by means of 
an ion or carrier of a charge of electricity; something in- 
creases its electrical charge; the electrical charge of some- 
thing else decreases; oxygen unites with something else, form- 
ing an oxide. We constantly exhale carbon dioxide—the end- 
product of the oxidation of carbon. Heat is always liberated 
during oxidation; our exhaled air is always warm air. 

Our viscera consume much energy in capturing oxygen and 
in converting foods into physiological fuel, especially into 
a sugar called glucose, or when stored in the liver, muscles, 
or other tissues, called glycogen. Stimulate the splanchnic 
nerve with electricity, and the liver will convert glycogen to 
glucose—by hydrolysis; rearrange the molecules of glucose, 
it becomes lactic acid, which by dehydrogenation becomes 
pyruvic acid. This, oxidized, becomes acetaldehyde. This, 
oxidized, becomes carbon dioxide and water—materials to 
be eliminated from the body that plants may reincorporate 
them into sugar-cane or grapes or potatoes. 

When man digs up the potato, the “potato” that is in his 
arm as glycogen is oxidized, but only partially. The fate 
of the lactic acid that is left over is not quite known, but 
oxidation processes are known to be involved. 

What is oxidation, then? Every process involved in digging 
up potatoes or in thinking about potatoes. Potatoes them- 
selves are stored energy. Cut one open; it turns black— 
that also is oxidation. 

A helping of mashed potatoes contains enough energy to 
raise the temperature of about 400 pounds of water about 
two degrees, or to enable a man to sweat enough to keep his 
body cool for one hour’s work digging potatoes. 

The potatoes carried to the cellar will lie dormant, if the 
cellar is not too warm and damp, until the following spring. 

121 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


Then, cut into bits and put into warm, moist ground, they 
will begin to grow. Each “eye” of each potato will grow; 
it is a “germ.” Every living germ, whether plant or animal, 
contains enough stored energy to enable it to respond to 
vital situations. In its responses or actions it will capture 
more energy. The capacity of growing things for work is 
perhaps the most astounding phenomenon in the universe. 
Growing trees can split rocks with their roots and lift tons of 
matter hundreds of feet above the ground. Swelling peas in 
an iron pot lifted a cover weighted with 160 pounds. 

Now here is a curious thing. The potato digger dies when 
his heart stops beating. He is dead; but millions and millions 
of cells of his dead body will remain alive for hours—they 
have not yet exhausted their oxygen and fuel. Aseptically 
removed from the body and kept moist on ice, some tissue 
cells will remain alive for ten days. If placed in a certain 
solution and oxygen, their life can be prolonged indefinitely. 
Connective tissue cells have been cultivated for years. All 
they seem to require is proper environment. Their capacity 
to live and multiply outside man’s body has opened new 
conceptions of life. 

Life is a dynamic relationship between structure and en- 
vironment. We do not live long when the oxygen of our 
environment is shut off. The faster we live, the more oxygen 
we require. When our reptilian ancestor improved the 
mechanism begun by amphibia for capturing oxygen from 
the air instead of from the water, an enormously important 
step in life was made. When our mammalian ancestor, by 
supplying a diaphragm, perfected that mechanism, breathing 
became a delight and oxygen easy to get. Fast living became 
possible. But whether we live fast or slow, and whether we 
work with our hands or with our brains, or do no work at 
all, our living body must work to keep alive. We must have 
energy. We cannot get it from an electric current, we can- 
not get it from mere gravity, we cannot get it from the rays 
of the sun as plants can, but get it we must or die. As our 

122 


THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


bodily mechanism and all animal bodies are internal-com- 
bustion engines, we get our energy from the oxidation of 
foodstuffs converted into physiological fuel. The capture 
and transformation of energy is the most fundamental of all 
living processes. How food and oxygen are made available 
for consumption in our growing-going bodily mechanism is 
a process of fundamental importance. 


my 


When we finish our day’s work, we walk to our car and 
drive home. (We may have no car: we allow ourselves one 
for purposes of illustration.) 

The motor-mechanism with which we walk to our car 
weighs about eighty pounds: sixty of muscle, twenty of bones. 
With every step we take, about 300 muscles are in action. 
Only as muscles contract and relax can we move. By con- 
tracting, muscles shorten—they do not push, they pull. The 
bones support the muscles, the muscles move the bones as 
levers. 

Muscles are in opposing groups. With a certain group we 
turn our head; mere relaxing of this group will not restore 
the head to its original position: we must use the other group. 
To balance our head on our spine, we use 20 muscles; to 
balance our spine with each step, 144 muscles. 

Muscles are engines, each made up of hundreds of thou. 
sands of tiny individual muscle-cell engines. With each step, 
over one hundred million engines are at work. 

When muscle responds to stimulus of nerve or electrode 
of an induction coil, lactic and perhaps some other acid 
is liberated from some compound in the muscle itself. This 
reaction changes the hydrogen ion concentration in the muscle 
cell; it contracts, shortens. Some of the lactic acid is oxi- 
dized and heat is formed, the remaining lactic acid is re- 
stored to the compound from which it was used. Meanwhile, 
the glycogen stored in the muscle has been called on to supply 

123 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


the energy of the transaction. With the disappearance of the 
lactic acid, the muscle returns to its former resting condition; 
it relaxes. All this takes place in all the half-million or 
more muscle cells of every single muscle involved. 

Microscopically small blood vessels bring oxygen and 
fuel which is “burned” with the aid of oxygen, without 
which there is no combustion in muscle or auto engine. Micro- 
scopically small veins carry away the products of combus- 
tion, the same in muscle as in the auto engine—water and 
carbon dioxide. In the kidneys the blood is relieved of the 
water; in the lungs, of the carbon dioxide. 

The blood itself is driven about by the heart, an engine of 
such tiny muscle engines so fused together that they cannot 
be teased apart with the finest needle. Marvelous it is that 
the heart knows how fast it must do its work if it is to give 
adequate service. While quiet at our desk, the heart pours 
about five pints of blood into our aorta every minute. When 
we run uphill, the heart will drive blood into the aorta seven 
times that fast—thirty-five pints a minute! And from the 
great aorta the blood will be carried to every one of the 
millions of millions of cells in the body. Wherever the body 
is scratched, wherever the mosquito dips his bill, there blood 
is found. 

Running uphill requires much energy: much sugar is oxi- 
dized, much carbon dioxide is generated. Hence the faster 
heartbeat, to hurry the blood to get more oxygen and fuel, 
to get rid of more carbon dioxide. The extra sugar needed 
is picked up from the sugar-bin in the liver; the oxygen is 
got from the lungs. While the red blood-cells are reloading 
oxygen from the six million air-sacs in the lungs, the blood 
itself is giving up its excess carbon dioxide. 

These air-sacs are always ready to do their duty. That is 
why the bellows moved by twenty-four levers of bone must 
work faster in uphill work; they must keep the air in the 
lung air-sacs constant; not have more than 5 per cent of 
carbon dioxide. But as running uphill burned up seven 

124 


THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


times as much fuel as sitting at rest, there was seven times 
as much waste product of combustion to be got rid of. That 
makes us “pant”: our bellows work faster and keep up the 
pace until the normal proportion of carbon dioxide is re- 
stored in the little air-sacs. 

We need about thirty ounces of fuel a day to keep our 
body machine in good trim. The combustion of that fuel 
makes just the same amount of heat in our body engines as if 
burned in any other engine. In fact, so much of our fuel 
goes into heat that if we could not get rid of the surplus gen- 
erated in running or in any hard work, our blood would 
jell. 

One ameba has been seen to chase another ameba, catch 
up with it, begin to swallow it, lose it, chase it again, recap- 
ture it, lose it, chase it, capture it, and “swallow” it: by flow- 
ing around it and thus inclosing it within its own body. By 
and by the little cannibal opened up its body and moved away 
from the débris of the dead ameba. A little later it divided 
and then there were two. (Few of us can do more than 
that in a day—some do less in a lifetime and leave nothing 
behind but the débris of their dead protoplasm.) That ameba 
has no liver, no alimentary canal, heart, lungs, gills, or 
mouth. Yet in that little body of one cell every essential 
phenomenon of life takes place. It functions, even as a 
human being. 

The difference between ameba and man is not unlike that 
between a tiny motor-boat and the biggest ship afloat. Man 
has more parts, the parts are vastly more intricate. He carries 
a heavier load, moves faster, goes farther. 

All this requires great energy. But we no more make 
energy than a motor or a dynamo. We must capture it first, 
then convert it. Every move we make, every word we speak, 
every thought that passes through our brain, every beat of 
our heart, every breath we draw awake or asleep, requires 
energy; and all the while we must run a refrigerating plant 
or boil over, and a heating plant or freeze to death. Our 

125 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


motor mechanism must be oiled at every point of friction. 
Our nervous system must be protected, cleaned, and kept in 
repair. Because we are fearfully and wonderfully made, we . 
must have much energy merely to keep alive. 

But as long as we are alive, and whether afoot or on 
horseback, awake or asleep, we are going machines: the 
chest rises and falls, the heart beats, the blood circulates, 
metabolism goes on, life functions; energy is required. But 
however energetic we may feel, we cannot will our heart to 
stop beating or commit suicide by holding our breath; we 
may hold our breath long enough to lose consciousness: our 
lungs then will resume rising and falling. Back of conscious 
effort, and so’ well organized that conscious effort may be 
dispensed with, is a human body which functions as long as 
it is fed and can maintain itself in a state of dynamic equilib- 
rium. 

Our inheritance seems to have set a limit to the duration 
of that equilibrium. To discover its nature and how to main- 
tain it is the great problem. Now that we have ceased to 
be merely objects of religious superstition or of philosophic 
speculation, we car. take our lease on life into a court where 
it can have a fair trial. That court has already solved great 
problems formerly held in awe and garbed in mystery. There 
is no known inherent reason why the problem of dynamic 
equilibrium in living organisms should not be solved. 

The ameba solved it; man solves it for fragments (the 
germ-cells) of his body. Even tumor cells are potentially 
immortal. Much, if not all, of the tissue of our body is 
potentially tumor. If ameba solved it, why not man? 

The goal is such knowledge of the living that disease may 
be prevented and the grave robbed of its victory. We of this 
generation shall not attain that goal, but it is a goal toward 
which humanity may turn with much hope and some confi- 
dence. Meanwhile, there is the immediate problem of hang- 
ing on to such lease of life as has been bequeathed to us. 
As a nation with unlimited resources and as a race with large 

126 


THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE, 


brains, we abuse our lease of life, often with fatal results. 
Many preserve their strength merely to make their lungs 
breathe and their heart beat. The evolution that ended with 
reptiles sufficed for such processes; human brains were 
evolved for higher forms of life. 


3 


You may be growing: you require food to build up tissue. 
You may be going: you require energy. Both growing and 
going are change, metabolism. But building is an assimila- 
tion process; you construct or repair something: that is con- 
structive metabolism, or anabolism. But the exhibition of 
energy involves dissimilation; by converting complex sub- 
stances into simple ones you destroy something: that is de- 
structive metabolism, or katabolism. In both metabolic proc- 
esses there is a residue: husks not used in assimilation, others 
left from the destruction. These are excretions and must 
be eliminated from the body. 

Our energy is derived from fuel in the form of food. Our 
daily fuel needs vary according to our age, size, sex, and 
especially the amount of energy we expend. A lumberjack 
expends more energy than a lounge-lizard. 

A pound of sugar burned in our body yields as much heat 
as a pound of sugar burned in a chemical oven. Heat is a 
form of energy, and when measured in units required to 
raise the temperature of one kilogram (about two pints) of 
water from Q° to 1° Centigrade (about 2 degrees), is called 
a calorie, or “great calorie.” 

Sugar burned in our body makes energy available. Of 
such fuel we normally have in reserve and stored in muscles 
and the liver about ten ounces, or 1,200 calories. That is 
potential energy. Suppose we burn it, as we do when chop- 
ping wood; how much energy would we get? Enough to lift 
a weight of one hundred tons to a height of three feet. That 
is our normal potential energy reserve. 

127 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


To do nothing, just to keep alive, quiet, flat on our back, we 
require about 1,700 calories a day, enough to lift nearly 
two hundred tons one foot. That amount of energy goes 
into heartbeat, breathing, keeping the body at a constant 
temperature and alive. It is called basal metabolism. 

The energy consumption, in calories, per kilogram in 
doubling the birth body weight is: colts, 4,512; lambs, 4,243; 
kittens, 4,554; babies, 28,864. It is biologically significant 
that the child of man requires six times more energy to 
grow a pound than a calf does. And for every calf of stunted 
growth in the world there are 600 stunted children! Basal 
metabolism, as we might expect, is highest in childhood. After 
the fifteenth year it drops sharply to twenty, thereafter it 
slowly declines throughout life. The growing body stores up 
energy in the form of new tissue. : 

We eat a meal; digestion is metabolism also, work. For 
the work of digesting a meal, 170 calories must be added to 
the 1,700 needed for basal metabolism. Reading is work: 
for two hours, add 10 calories more; for a five-mile walk or 
two hours at golf, 300 calories; for twelve hours swivel-chair 
work (mostly expended in muscle work in holding the body in 
the chair), 250 calories. Total, 2,450 calories; or say 2,500 
for an average man. In a body completely relaxed but with 
the brain actively at work, so little extra energy is consumed 
that the calorimeter cannot find it! The more active the work, 
the more calories required. A farmer will use up 1,000 more 
calories a day than a bookkeeper. A lumberman may use up 
7,000 in one day; a six-day bicyclist, 10,000. 

Food consumed in excess of energy required is stored as 
fat: under the skin, around the abdomen, between the muscles; 
but not in the more active tissues—even a “fat-head” has 
little fat in his brain. 

Du Bois points out that when a man has maintained a 
weight of 165 pounds for twenty years—as many do—it 
means that of a total consumption of 18,250,000 calories he 

128 


THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


has not stored or lost more than 9,300, enough calories for 
two pounds of fat—‘‘an exactness equaled by few mechanical 
devices and almost no other biologic process.”” But suppose 
a man of 165 pounds doubles his weight in twenty years; 
that means that he has added 22 pounds of fatty tissue and 
133 pounds of fat. And one small extra pat of butter a day 
will do it; there is enough energy in that pat of butter to 
walk one and one-third miles. As Du Bois says, he ate 
eleven grams too much butter, or walked one and one-third 
miles too little. | 

Sitting up in a chair is work: muscles are contracted, 
energy is liberated as heat and as work performed. Both 
can be measured in calories, the work calories in terms of 
the mechanical equivalent of heat. This has practical value. 
A machine that develops three heat to one work calorie is 
25 per cent efficient. Muscles holding up the body in a chair 
develop three heat-calories to one of work. Our muscles are 
about 25 per cent efficient. But a trained muscle is 40 per 
cent efficient. A habitual chair-worker requires less energy 
to sit still than does one accustomed to being on his feet. 
Some men find sitting in a chair for any length of time really 
hard work. 

Two men at the same work, blow for blow, stroke for 
stroke, step for step: one sweats; the other is cool as a cucum- 
ber. One was not used to it, was not trained; many of his 
calories went into heat. The other was trained, it was his 
steady job; he got more work out of his calories. 

To get more work out of our calories is to function better. 
To function better is to live longer. If we find that the thing 
we trust to pick the mother of our children is simply a double- 
barreled pump, knowledge of our heart or the liquid refresh- 
ment it pumps to our brain will not grow more nerve cells, 
but it should make us less nervous and more respectful of 
the pump and the refreshment it delivers; when it stops, the 
brain starves to death. 

129 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


4 


Water, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen made life possible. 
Bacteria make plants possible. Plants make animals pos- 
sible. Did it ever occur to you that, apart from a few but 
necessary mineral salts, everything we eat is or has been 
alive? About 50 per cent of our body is carbon. We are 
oxidizing carbon every moment of our life. We must have 
carbon. We can eat lampblack, charcoal, and diamond dust 
(all carbon); we cannot digest them. Anything we eat and 
do not digest remains a foreign substance that must be elimi- 
nated. There is carbon dioxide in the air we breathe, but we 
cannot build the carbon of that compound into our body or 
burn it for its energy with the. aid of the oxygen of the 
water we drink. In short, we are dependent on shoddy, 
second-hand material. Plants are closer to Nature and not 
so dependent. 

To photograph is to light-write; to photosynthesize is to 
light-put-together. With sunlight through a green filter called 
chlorophyll (green-leaf) plants decompose the carbon dioxide 
of the air and combine its carbon with the oxygen and hydro- 
gen of water to make carbohydrates (carbon-water), so named 
because they always contain hydrogen and oxygen in the same 
proportions as they are found in water—twice as much hydro- 
gen as oxygen. | 

The simplest carbohydrate is sugar. But sugar is soluble 
and easily washed away. When plants need to store sugar, 
they change it to a starch. Starch is a more complex sugar, 
same kind of atoms but combined into different molecules. 
By further combinations of the same elements, plants form 
fats or oils. Plants can synthesize sugars and fats because 
water of soil and carbon dioxide of air are available and 
because plants can use the sun’s energy through their photo- 
synthetic power. If the plant had not thus made carbon fit 
to eat, this earth would be a No-man’s land. Ninety-five 

130 


THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


per cent of the materials of our body are made available 
by plants’ photosynthetic power. 

Another 2 per cent of us is nitrogen—small but important. 
There is no flesh and no protoplasm without nitrogen. The 
air we breathe contains nitrogen, but we can no more use it 
than we can the carbon dioxide of air. We get our nitrogen 
also from plants, or from animals which originally got it 
from plants. Foods which contain nitrogen are proteins 
(protos, first) or nitrogenous foods. 

Proteins, while enormously complex, are only compounds 
of the same three elements found in sugars and fats plus nitro- 
gen and mineral salts. Here is where bacteria come in. 
Plants can fix their own carbon, but they must go to bacteria 
for their nitrogen. As a dead horse contains more nitrogen 
than an acre of wheat, his nitrogen must be kept in circula- 
tion. Bacteria do the work. They are the “middlemen of 
the nutritive chain.” 

In one gram of soil, says Jordan, the following bacteria 
have been found: peptone-decomposing, 3,750,000; urea-de- 
composing, 50,000; denitrifying, 50,000; nitrifying, 7,500; 
nitrogen-fixing, 25. Just how bacteria wreck a dead horse 
is not known, because so little is known as to the structure 
of the protein molecule. But “eventually, out of the seething 
caldron of molecular disintegration, emerge such relatively 
simple bodies as organic acids and amins, mercaptan, sul- 
phuretted hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and ammonia.” 

The ammonia may be oxidized to nitrites, and the nitrites 
oxidized to nitrates. ‘This is nitrification, and enormously 
important for the food supply of the world; otherwise, the 
ammonia from decaying plant life and from manures would 
not be available for living plants. Sulphur bacteria change 
the sulphuretted hydrogen of mineral springs and decaying 
tissue to sulphur, which oxidizes to sulphuric acid. This, 
uniting with certain other substances, forms sulphates; in this 
form plants can build them into tissue. The nitrogen-fixing 
bacteria get their nitrogen direct from the air mixed in with 

131 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


the soil. They make their home in little nodules of the roots 
of such plants as clover and beans, and by enriching the soil 
with nitrogenous compounds make higher plant life possible. 

Bacteria are also the great scavengers of the sea, turning 
loose carbon dioxide, ammonia, and ammoniate materials 
which alge build into food compounds which make higher 
sea life possible. 

Thomson relates how boxes of mud and manure were set 
alongside a fish pond which was about to give out. Bacteria 
multiplied, making food for tiny protozoa. These overflowed 
into the pond and were eaten by tiny crustacea and similar 
small fry. There was now food for fish. They multiplied, 
and were eaten by man. Fish is said to be food for brains. 

It is not. But what looked like mud became part of man. 
And at last man used his brain, invented a microscope, dis- 
covered bacteria, and opened a new account with life. 

To return to our mutton. Plants find nitrates in the soil, 
also sulphates and phosphates. These they combine with 
the elements they photosynthesize into carbohydrates and fats 
to make proteins. Any bean can. But before we can build 
the protein of a bean or a peanut, or of milk or an egg or a 
chop, into our own protoplasm, we must reduce these complex 
substances to simpler ones. This building of protein into 
our body is synthesis, but our synthetic power is far below 
that of plants. We must first wreck a body that was alive to 
get the material with which to build our own living body. 

For example. We eat a mutton chop; we do not build a 
mutton chop into our body. As mutton, it is of no value to 
us; we can only use the materials mutton is made of. By the 
time that chop is carted around by the blood and delivered 
at cell doorsteps, it is no more mutton than a string-bean is 
a fish. We make our own flesh out of the same materials 
fish, beans, and sheep use in making their body. We recom- 
bine these materials according to our own formule. But we 
can only recombine them when we have torn them down, re- 

132 


THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


duced them to materials the cells of our body know how to 
use. 

That is why we must digest food, that is what our digestive 
system is for: to wreck the dead that it may be absorbed into 
the living. Anything that can be absorbed is food. The 
wrecking process is digestion, work; energy is consumed. 
Food is also stored energy. But before that energy is avail- 
able for us, we must reduce it to physiological fuel in our 
alimentary canal. 


5 


A white blood-corpuscle swallows a bacterium whole. It 
breaks it up into bits: digestion. Of these bits it selects such 
as it requires: absorption. It opens its body and moves away 
from such bits as it does not require: excretion. Simple 
enough. Really, enormously complicated. Perhaps the most 
complicated process known to man; and no man knows much 
about it, even in phagocyte or ameba. 

Each cell in our body is also a living animal and must 
have its bits: building materials and energy for building and 
for regulation. To prepare bits fit for cell requirements 
is the special job of a special group of cells arranged in 
special tissues and equipped for this particular purpose: the 
alimentary canal and accessories, the digestive system. Its 
sole business is to reduce dead matter to such standard sub: 
stances as can be delivered by the blood and can be used by 
living cells for vital processes. Any matter which can be thus 
reduced and utilized by living organisms for vital processes 
is food. 

The alimentary canal is a single thirty-foot-long tube open 
at both ends; most of it is coiled up in the abdomen. It is 
lined with mucous membrane and coated with muscle which 
contracts and relaxes, forcing food forward. These muscles 
work ceaselessly under the drive of their own engines, of 
which there are about 2,000,000 per inch of canal. Valves 

133 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


prevent food moving in the opposite direction. Below the 
diaphragm the canal’s outer muscle coat is serous, moistened 
from the serum of lymph, as is also the mesentery or ruffled 
peritoneal fold which connects the intestine with the back of 
the abdominal wall. This makes them smooth and slippery; 
they keep up their ceaseless movements and are not worn out 
by friction. 

Food is sampled in the mouth. If O.K.’d, it is chewed fine 
and mixed with saliva, a secretion of the salivary glands. 
This breaks it up, aerates it, moistens it, and makes it go 
down easily: first step in reduction. That step signals the 
stomach, “Get ready, food coming down’; the stomach be- 
gins to secrete gastric juice. 

From the mouth, food enters the cone-shaped pharynx 
suspended from the skull—the busiest spot in the body at 
meal times, especially if there is conversation. Its upper 
mucous lining contains much lymphoid tissue. In that 
children develop adenoids—best “outgrown” with a knife. 
Adenoid growths may cause children to become “mouth 
breathers,” thereby opening the mouth to do the nose’s work, 
which is to prepare the air for the lungs. 

Put your hand on your Adam’s apple and swallow. Easy 
as pie, but one of the most complicated processes in nature. 
The esophagus must be opened, and passages to mouth, nose, 
and windpipe must be closed. If the windpipe-man is asleep, 
food starts for the lungs instead of the stomach. In the Lungs 
it is still out-of-doors, subject to any vulture that happens 
along. We cough it up only when the windpipe cilia raise it 
up within coughing distance. Fortunately, our swallowing 
apparatus works so well that we do not often have to cough it 
up. In fact, it is so complicated and does its work so well 
that a swallowing center in the brain is assumed. 

Once food reaches the esophagus or gullet, it is gone. The 
mere act of swallowing suffices to shoot it to the upper or 
sphincter end of the stomach. Time, one-tenth of a second. 
If the food is semi-solid, it is forced down by peristaltic 

134 


THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


waves in the circular muscles of the esophagus. Time, six 
seconds. Whether food is held up by the sphincter before 
passing into the stomach proper (and if so, how long) is dis- 
puted. 

As ours is a mixed diet, we do not require such huge com- 
pound stomachs as the hay-feeders have. Ours is a simple 
stomach with a five-pint or six-hour capacity. That enables 
us to give much time to other organs. Without a stomach, 
we should have to nibble all the time. 

Although simple, our stomach is not so well understood as 
it might be. It has three muscle layers, lengthwise, oblique, 
and circular. They vary in thickness in different regions, 
and contract and expand according to the work they have to 
perform. Thus, carbohydrates receive stomach treatment 
different from that given to proteins and fats. But contrac- 
tions begin a few minutes after food enters the stomach, 
thereby further reducing it and mixing it with gastric juice, 
which consists of mucin and pepsin. Pepsin is a combination 
of hydrochloric acid and pepsinogen. All three juices are 
secreted by glands. 

As a result of mixture and contractions, the more liquid 
food, called chyme, is forced toward the lower or pyloric 
(gatekeeper) end of the stomach. The pylorus opens—-so it 
is believed—when the chyme pressing against it has reached 
a certain degree of acidity. It now enters the twenty-foot-long 
small intestine—the main seat of digestion and absorption, 
the cleverest analytical chemical laboratory known to science. 
Into this intestine a few inches from the stomach also come 
bile from the liver and a fluid from the pancreas, also the 
intestinal juice secreted by millions of tiny glands. Also, 
now and then, the bacillus of typhoid fever or the ameba of 
dysentery. 

The lining or mucous coat of the small intestine is easily 
one of the marvels of the world—in structure and accomplish- 
ment. It is thrown into innumerable irregular but permanent 
folds. These increase the surface of the mucous coat and 

135 


WHY WE BEAAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


slow up the passage of food. The surface itself is like velvet 
or a bath-towel, due to four million minute finger-like pro- 
jections, or villi. Each villus is connected with a lymph 
vessel, an arteriole, and a vein; is inclosed in a layer of epi- 
thelium; and contains a muscle. Under a microscope, each 
villus can be seen to lash about and “pump” up and down. 

Beyond is the large intestine (cecum, colon, rectum), from 
five to six feet in length and from two and one-half to a half- 
inch in diameter. Digestive and absorption processes are con- 
cluded here. The cecum (blind) begins as a pouch, the 
small intestine opening into it on the side. At the “blind” 
end is the opening of the vermiform appendix, also blind, 
also a threat, and of no known use to man except as a happy 
hunting ground for gangrene and other bacteria. 

Both small and large intestines have two muscle coats: 
the outer, longitudinal; the inner, circular. They produce 
two kinds of movements: peristaltic, or waves of constriction 
which force food onward;, rhythmic—local constrictions 
which mass food in spots or areas and then break up the 
masses. Such segregations, Cannon finds, occur every two 
seconds. .An animate churn, as it were; and “keep moving” 
is its motto. 

The two great organs of digestion are pancreas and liver, 
both marvelous chemists. The pancreas secretes enzymes or 
ferments; the liver works over materials brought by venous 
blood from intestines, stomach, spleen, and pancreas. It 
manufactures bile; turns glucose into glycogen; reconverts 
glycogen into glucose when ordered; and converts by-products 
into urea. It is an enormously busy organ; the fires under 
its retort are always burning; its blood requirements alone 
account for one-fourth the entire volume of blood in the body, 
or more than may be found in heart, lungs, and great blood 
vessels at any given moment. 

No heat, no digestion; digestion stops with ice water, re- 
sumes when the blood has warmed the water to blood-heat. 
If the blood gets chilled, it can find a warm spot in the liver. 

136 


THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


6 


First on life’s bill of fare is water. No water, no life. 
A man of 150 pounds thoroughly dried out weighs 50 pounds; 
he has evaporated that much water. Bones are nearly half 
water; our blood, 90 per cent; the three-months’ human 
fetus, 94 per cent. And half the entire water content of 
the body is found in muscles. Without water, no living proc- 
ess takes place; nothing can take its place for washing away 
our body’s sins. Except for the early hunger pangs we can 
starve to death in peace, burning our body for its energy, 
dehydrating our tissue for its water. But without water and 
on the desert we perish miserably within a few days, the 
agony growing with the hours. 

Other important inorganic foods are mineral salts: cal- 
cium, iron, magnesium, chlorine, phosphorus, sulphur, so- 
dium, potassium. They play important réles in vital proc- 
esses and are found in all protoplasm. Silicon and flu- 
orine are found in certain tissues and are presumably 
necessary for our existence. 

Iron in the protein of the red blood-cell carries oxygen. 
Fluorine is a minor tooth-and-bone builder and possibly 
helps form the cement which holds the cells together. Iodine 
is found in the thyroid gland. Silicon is found in bones, hair, 
and the crystalline lens of our eye. Chlorine is necessary 
for the hydrochloric acid of gastric juice. Calcium and phos- 
phorus are necessary for bone. There is no end to the im- 
portance of these inorganic compounds or the uses the body 
makes of them. Some are especially essential during growth. 
They are found in the organic compounds of plant or animal 
bodies which we eat as food; they are set free in digestion and 
are available for growth and repair. 

The three food groups proper are organic compounds: 
carbohydrates, fats, proteins. We eat more carbohydrates 
than fats or proteins, but they do not remain with us long: 

137 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 
we keep using them up day by day. They are the body’s 


primary sources of fuel. 

Carbohydrates consist of sugars and starches and related 
substances. Their chemistry is fairly simple, their structure 
complex. To get an inkling of this structure is to begin to 
understand several important biologic and physiologic phe- 
nomena and will help explain why we cannot, for example, 
digest sawdust, and why our liver must convert sugar to 
starch or we die—without insulin. 

Note, again, that carbon atoms alone can form such diverse 
substances as lampblack and diamonds; the real difference 
is in the way the carbon-atoms are combined into molecules. 
Carbon atoms are constituent elements of all carbohydrates; 
the hydrogen and oxygen atoms present are always in the 
proportions found in water. But with these water elements 
the carbon enters to form structures not only of great com- 
plexity, but (and this is the main point) of such structure 
that the molecules cannot pass through the wall of the intes- 
tine into the blood or can pass through the filter membrane of 
the kidneys. In the one case the molecule never gets into cir- 
culation, in the other it passes out of circulation before the 
body cells can use it. 

In other words, food is not what we eat, but what can be 
so altered in the alimentary canal that it can pass through 
the canal wall into the blood-stream and can be used by the 
body mechanism for building, fuel, or storage purposes. Most 
foods are insoluble colloids or colloidal in nature: during di- 
gestion they are converted into soluble crystalloids: as such 
they can pass into the blood-stream; as colloids they cannot. 
By rough analogy, diamonds are crystalloid, lampblack is 
colloidal. If our digestive laboratory could wreck the crystal- 
loid structure of a diamond molecule so that the carbon 
atoms could pass into our blood-stream, we could be said to 
digest diamonds. It cannot use the carbon atoms in a dia- 
mond because it cannot wreck the diamond molecule. The 

138 


THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


same clay-pit may furnish the mud for a hovel and the brick 
for a Michigan Avenue French chateau. 

We tap a maple tree and collect the sap; boil it down to 
sugar, which crystallizes and is soluble. We eat the sugar; 
reduced further in the alimentary canal, it passes into the 
blood-stream and is converted in the liver to glycogen (animal 
starch), colloidal, insoluble; it can now be stored, in muscle, 
for example. The sap flows up the tree, the tree converts it 
into cellulose and other complex starches; for the tree, the 
sugar is immediate or reserve food and cellulose. 

There is almost no end to the specific carbohydrates in the 
plant world. Of these, some twenty important kinds are 
recognized and are faded into three groups. 

The monosaccharides, glucoses, or simple sugars, generally 
contain six atoms of carbon (the hexoses) ; a few, only five 
(the pentoses). Glucose, dextrose, or “grape- sugar,’ is 
found in all animal tissues and in all fruit juices. Commer- 
cial glucose is manufactured from starch. Fructose, or 
“fruit-sugar,” is found in honey and many plant juices. 
Galactose is found in such combinations as the cerebrosides 
of the brain and in vegetable gums. Arabinose is found in 
gum-arabic and cherry-tree gum. 

The disaccharides, or complex sugars, are formed by the 
combination of two monosaccharide molecules, with the elimi- 
nation of a water molecule. The three important complex 
sugars are: sucrose or cane-sugar, in sweet juices of plants, 
especially in sugar-cane, sorghum cane, sugar maple, and 
sugar beet; lactose or milk-sugar, in milk; and maltose or 
malt-sugar, in malted grains. 

The polysaccharides are still more complex. They are 
_ formed of monosaccharides by combining variable numbers 
of sugar molecules and eliminating a corresponding number 
of water molecules. The formula of some polysaccharides 
is so complex as thus far to baffle analysis. Starch, found in 
grains, tubers, roots, etc., as stored energy for growth, occurs 
in two forms, but whether the difference is chemical or merely 

139 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


physical, and whether there are one or many kinds of starch, 
is not known. But every kind of plant has its own distinctive 
starch grain—otherwise we should not know whether our 
“‘tapioca’’ is sago or mere potato. The starch grain of a bean 
is as unlike the starch grain of corn as a grain of corn is 
unlike a bean. Three-fourths of the potato and more than 
half of cereals is starch. Sago, tapioca, and arrowroot are 
almost pure starch. 

Other “starches” are glycogen, found in all animal tissues 
and in yeast; agar-agar, found in seaweeds; lichenin, found 
in Iceland moss; gum-arabic, found in certain trees; and 
cellulose. 

Cellulose forms the cell-wall of plants, the hard part, the 
fiber; cotton, linen, straw, wood. Celery, beets, and turnips 
contain more cellulose than fruits, potatoes, or flour. What 
bone is to animals, cellulose is to plants. That is why we 
cannot digest it and why trees are possible. If we could digest 
it, sugar would be as cheap as sawdust. Herbivorous animals 
can utilize it because they have a large cecum where cellulose 
can be retained for a long enough time to be fermented by 
bacteria. Our cecum is relatively smaller and does not retain 
food so long; the cellulose we ingest is excreted. 

Yet chemically, cellulose is potential sugar. Why, then, the 
peculiar qualities of wood, and why can we not digest saw- 
dust? Because, as Sponsler has recently shown, of its peculiar 
architecture. We cannot wreck it. The atoms in a cellulose 
molecule are arranged on an up-and-down plan like beads on 
a string, and the beads cling together for dear life. In an 
inch-long piece of match there are many strings of “beads”; 
each string or column contains about 50,000,000 molecules 
end to end. They are pulled apart only with great difficulty. 
Wood is more easily split lengthwise than broken across, 
more easily crushed lengthwise than pulled asunder, swells 
sidewise but not lengthwise, and is digested by no animal 
higher than protozoa. Even termites or “‘white ants” can- 
not eat up furniture and houses without the assistance of the 

140 


THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


microorganisms which infest their alimentary canal; deprived 
of their parasitic digesters, they starve to death within a 
month. 

The second great group of organic foods is fats; ““compara- 
tively inert substances with long, complicated formule,” Du 
Bois characterizes them. They consist of one molecule of 
glycerin (an alcohol) and three of a fatty acid: palmitic, 
stearic, oleic, etc. Oleic acid is found in vegetable oils: olive, 
peanut, corn, etc. In process of digestion such foods—under 
the body’s own steam, water, enzymes, and mineral acids— 
are reduced to glycerin and fatty acids. Outside the body, 
they are reduced to glycerin and soap. The late World War 
fat shortage was due to the wholesale wreckage of fats to 
recover the glycerin to make into nitroglycerin. 

Lipoids are complex fats, so complex that their chemistry 
is not well understood. One group contain phosphorus and 
are thought to occur in every living cell, especially in nerve 
tissues. Lipoids are found also in the liver, muscles, and yolk 
of eggs. 

Bulk for bulk, no food contains so much potential energy 
as solid fats and oils. When eaten, fat can be burned or 
stored. The Eskimo eat it to keep warm. Whales wrap a 
foot-thick layer around their bodies for the same purpose— 
fat is a great insulator. Certain Ungulates have special fat 
reservoirs for lean days: the humps of camels and drome- 
daries and of the humped or sacred cattle of India, and the 
tails of fat-tailed sheep. 

Proteins are complex beyond end. For example, a mole- 
cule of cane-sugar has a molecular weight of 342; of hemo- 
globin, 16,669. But that gives little suggestion of their 
dissimilar organization. It is like comparing a grain of 
sugar with an egg. 

Protein, freed of all else, is colorless, tasteless, odorless; 
and the basis of every cell in life from bacterium and alga 
to giant redwood and man. Apart from water, protein is the 
big constituent of eggs, cereals, peas, beans, lentils, peanuts, 

141 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


fish, flesh, and meat. The building-blocks of proteins are 
amino acids, organic compounds in which one hydrogen atom 
is replaced by a chemical compound closely related to 
ammonia. 

Twenty different amino acids are known. Most of these 
have been discovered in the protein of milk, wheat, corn, 
gelatin, chicken, and beef. But foods vary in the number 
of their amino acids and the relative amounts of each. The 
possibilities in their combinations are staggering, chemically 
practically infinite. There is milk and milk, and flesh and 
flesh, and eggs and eggs: each of its own kind. Just as mutton 
fat built into the human-body becomes quite a different kind 
of fat, so with protein. From the legumin of beans or the al- 
bumen of the white of an egg, or the gluten of wheat, or the 
gelatin of an ox’s tendon, man builds his own protein struc- 
ture. 

But we could not do it without vitamins. Until recently no 
one had ever seen a vitamin, nor had the chemical labora- 
tory isolated one; sixteen years ago no one had ever heard of 
one. And yet a real science of food is impossible without a 
knowledge of vitamins. Without vitamins (or something just 
as good) there is no normal growth, health, reproduction, or 
living out the span of life. 

Scurvy was known to the ancient Greeks, and through the 
centuries ravaged armies, crews of ships, and explorers cut 
off from fresh fruit and vegetables; seven years ago no one 
suspected the existence of the antiscorbutic vitamin. Thou- 
sands of children have hobbled out a pitiable existence on a 
rickety frame; until recently no one suspected it was because 
of lack of a specific mysterious antirachitic vitamin now 
known to exist in certain foods. About thirty years ago it 
was known that chickens fed on polished rice developed beri- 
beri, and that the same chickens fed on whole rice recovered; 
but no one then suspected the existence of an antineuritic 
vitamin in the polishings of rice or in milk. 

Innumerable experiments have now proved the existence of 

142 


THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


four, and possibly five, vitamins, and their necessity for 
human life and the metabolism of all food. Because of their 
minute amounts, their close association with the complex food 
substances, their proneness to disappear under manipulation, 
and because no good controls could be devised in testing, they 
defied isolation. But, by relying on feeding and by huge 
industry and patience, definite results have been obtained— 
and civilization again catches up with desiccated and tin- 
canned progress. In other words, the human body could 
find all it needed in the old vegetable garden and shambles; 
when food began to be refined, the vitamins were thrown out 
with the screenings. 

Fat-soluble A (because soluble in fat), or antirachitic 
vitamin, is probably first in importance. All animals experi- 
mentally treated die if their diet contains no vitamin A. It 
is presumably necessary for all higher animal life. It is 
known to be necessary for growth. Rachitic children pre- 
sumably suffer from lack, among other things, of vitamin A. 
With vitamin A their bones assume normal growth. Rachitic 
children were numerous in parts of Europe during the World 
War; when the milk supply became normal, the rickets 
disappeared. 

Vitamin A abounds in milk, cream, butter, egg yolk, cod- 
liver oil, and presumably all animal fat except pork. It is 
less abundant in spinach, tomatoes, cabbage, and lettuce. It 
is not destroyed by ordinary cooking, but is destroyed by great 
heat. 

According to a recent announcement, a semi-crystalline 
product containing carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen has lately 
been isolated by Takahashi and Kawakami from cod-liver 
oil, butter, and egg yolk. Presumably it is vitamin A in 
nearly pure form. Mice nearly dead from lack of fat-soluble 
A have been completely restored to health by small doses 
of the substance. 

W ater-soluble B, or antineuritic vitamin, is found in eggs 
and seeds. It is essential to growth, and lack of it is known 

143 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


to produce beri-beri. Seidell has recently isolated in nearly 
pure form from brewers’ yeast a substance which has anti- 
neuritic properties. Presumably it is vitamin B. 

W ater-soluble C, or antiscorbutic vitamin, has thus far de- 
fied isolation in any form. It is easily destroyed by alkalies 
and by oxidation. It is found especially in lemons, oranges, 
and tomatoes; also in all fruits, leaves, and root vegetables. 
Without such foods, scurvy. In the World War Mesopotam- 
ian campaign, Indian troops suffered from scurvy, British 
troops from beri-beri. The Indians were living on dried beans 
and peas, the British on tinned beef and biscuit. The dried 
beans and peas had lost their antiscorbutic vitamin, the white 
flour its antiberi-beri vitamin. 

Vitamin D, known to accelerate growth, is probably iden- 
tical with bios, a substance that promotes the growth of the 
yeast plant. Its molecule consists of five atoms of carbon, 
eleven of hydrogen, one of nitrogen, and three of oxygen. 
Enough bios to cover a pin-point will restore normal growth 


in a young animal stunted by a diet which does not have 


proper vitamins. 

Vitamin X is the latest. Evans has been experimenting 
with rats. If they get no vitamin X, they become sterile. He 
has also proved that natural foods contain a substance or 
substances essential for the normal functioning of the mam- 
mary gland. But certain substances (for example, vegetable 
oils) which promote fecundity do not necessarily improve 
lactation. 

In short, there are foods and foods: water, mineral salts, 
carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins. Is sunlight a “‘food” 
also? It depends. Children and hogs that play in the sun 
need no antirachitic vitamin; they do not develop rickets. 
Light is a marvelous oxidizing agent. Foods with no known 
vitamin A can by ultra-violet radiation become possessed of 
antirachitic property. These same rays get into our skin and 
“sunburn” us; they will paralyze an ameba in a quarter of a 

144 


THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


second, or kill and tear its body asunder like a bolt of light- 
ning in three seconds. 

How much of this or how much of that is good or necessary 
or lethal for us is a kind of knowledge that did not seriously 
trouble our remote ancestors, but which, with our increasing 
tendency to get away from cows, chickens, and gardens, and 
from natural conditions in general, becomes of first-rate im- 
portance. There was a time when a cook was a cook, good 
or bad as the case might be; to-day a cook should be a first- 
class chemist, the kitchen a chemical laboratory. 

Meanwhile, before we journey through the canal with food, 
it will be well to recall a fact of great importance. We eat 
food—and should enjoy it; it is the individual, microscopi- 
cally small cells of our body that are the ultimate consumers 
of that food. If these cells cannot use it (oxidize it for its 
working energy, or build it into themselves in repair and 
growth), we may have enjoyed our meal, but our body is as 
unnourished as though we had fasted and is poorer by 
the amount of energy expended in passing it through the 
mill. It is one thing for us to eat food and for our digestive 
system to analyze it; it is quite another matter (possibly the 
least understood phenomenon of living beings) for the cells 
of our body to synthesize it. Their astounding capacity to 
find what they want in astonishingly dilute solutions! 

With one part of carbon dioxide in 6,000,000 of water, an 
alga can grow. An ameba can find enough nitrogen in a 
solution which contains one part nitrate per million of water. 
Formaldehyde, if it exceeds one part in a thousand, is poison 
for an alga, yet when the solution of formaldehyde is less 
than lethal it will synthesize sugar, if deprived of carbon 
dioxide, from the vapor of formaldehyde. These figures, 
from McCollum, help us to realize that our digestive system 
must not only so reduce complex molecules that they lose their 
original structure, but that the resultant substances must be 
furnished to the cells of the body in proper solutions and 
“at a favorable rate.” 

145 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 
7 


The mechanics of digestion is simple. Food is chewed 
and swallowed. Esophagus drives it to the stomach. Stomach 
kneads it. Intestines roll it over and around and about, 
thoroughly mixing it with the juices of digestion. 

The chemistry of digestion is the removal of one or more 
molecules of water (hydrolysis) through the operation of 
enzymes. Thus, foods are so reduced that the substances of 
which they are composed can be absorbed by the tissues of 
the body or used for fuel to make heat or energy. 

In these processes, carbohydrates are reduced to “simple 
sugars’; fats, to glycerin and fatty acids; proteins, to amino 
acids. These are purely chemical processes. The alimentary 
canal is the chemical laboratory where these processes take 
place; especially the small intestine. In chemical labora- 
tories outside the body, such processes take place only with 
high temperature and catalyzers (dissolvers). 

Catalysts are curious in this: they hurry the reaction, are 
themselves unaltered by it, and to that extent do not actually 
take part in it. Thus, phosphorus will burn in oxygen in the 
presence of water, the water is unchanged; without the water, 
the phosphorus will not burn. The water was a catalyzer. 
Again, cane-sugar (sucrose) hydrolyzed with hydrochloric 
acid is reduced to glucose and fructose; at the end of the 
reaction there is as much hydrochloric acid as there was 
before, unchanged, as good as new, ready to do the same thing 
again when called upon. But as it passes on into the intestine 
with food it must be absorbed—presumably as something 
else—and again put into the stomach through the secretion 
of glands. Sucrose can also be reduced to glucose and 
fructose in boiling water, but it is a slow process. The cata- 
lyzer (hydrochloric acid) speeded the reaction, as will any 
acid that has electrically charged hydrogen ions. All carbo- 
hydrates, fats, and proteins can be hydrolyzed with great heat, 
or with catalysts. 

146 





THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


During hydrolysis, whether by boiling or with a catalyst, 
the compound loses one or more of its molecules of water. 
The polysaccharides hydrolyze into several and the disaccha- 
rides into two monosaccharide molecules. 

Our body temperature is so regulated as to remain con- 
stant at about 99 degrees. We cannot boil foods in our body 
laboratory. The body prepares its own catalysts: enzymes, 
chemical reagents that preside over every chemical reaction 
in living organisms. 

Enzyme means “in-leaven’’; because, like yeast, it causes 
fermentation. But yeasts are unicellular plants and make 
their own enzyme, zymase; with that as catalyst, they ferment 
sugar to alcohol, carbon dioxide, etc. 

No one has yet seen or isolated an enzyme; perhaps no one 
ever will. It is said that ultra-violet light rays of suitable 
length will bring about all the reactions which can be pro- 
duced by catalyzers; but that gives us no light at all on how 
enzymes perform in living bodies. 

An acid or an alkali reagent splitting a complex molecule 
has been compared to a hammer which smashes a clock and 
then picks up the undamaged particles. But enzymes, says 
Bechold, are more delicate tools: they are like keys which 
may unlock a thousand locks and fail when worn out. 

Armstrong thinks it possible that enzymes do not exist as 
entities: that they are part of a larger colloid complex; and 
that enzyme action is an interaction in which water is either 
distributed upon a single molecule which is thereby resolved 
into two others, or divided between two molecules, so that 
one is hydroxylated and the other is hydrogenated. In the 
strict sense of the term, then, an enzyme is not an entity, al- 
though it may have a double function: it attracts the hydrolyte, 
it determines its hydrolysis—it is both acceptor and agent. 
Armstrong suggests that synthesis in living cells is also 
brought about by enzyme action. Possibly all metabolic 
activity within or between the cells of the body may be due to 
enzyme action. In other words, the enzyme can not only 

147 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


smash the clock but can make one, provided it has the 
materials. 

Enzymes are relatively unstable and limited in their action, 
specifically selective and mainly hydrolytic. They activate 
water molecules. Hence it is assumed that they are struc- 
turally related to the substances (substrates) on which they 
act. It is their selective activity which forms the mechanism 
of metabolic regulations; otherwise katabolic or destructive 
changes would be uncontrolled. “Once the enzyme complex 
is formed, an electrochemical current in which active water 
molecules take part is completed; the energy being supplied 
. . . disruptive changes take place, leaving the enzyme free 
to form a fresh complex.” 

Reference has been made to the storage of sugars and fats 
in roots and seeds of plants. Something happens to these 
stored foods when the roots or seeds begin to sprout or germi- 
nate. The change that then takes place is due to enzyme ac- 
tion. A potato, for example, in a dry, cool cellar, breathes 
—absorbs oxygen, gives off carbon dioxide. Its enzymes 
are quiet. But suppose that the potato is frozen; its enzymes 
become active. Its amylase digests its starch to sugar, it 
becomes sweet; its protease reduces its proteins to amino- 
acids, it becomes bitter. But freezing has killed its germ: 
it is a dead potato; it can no longer defend itself against 
bacteria and, as McCollum says, soon rots. 

It is presumed that the enzymes in the potato were in an 
inactive state. Freezing activated them. During freezing, a 
crystalloid was added to the colloid complex enzyme—it 
became “activated.” Such an activator of an enzyme is a 
zymogen. Meaty | 

Pepsin, for example, is active in the alimentary canal only 
when activated by hydrochloric acid. The zymogen of pepsin 
is pepsinogen. Again, oxidases make biologic oxidations 
possible presumably by forming a system of organic sub- 
stances which can take up molecular oxygen to form peroxide 

148 


THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


and part with one or both atoms to another substance, the 
transfer being hastened by a zymogen, peroxidase. 

The enzymes in the potato in the cellar were inactive, 
inhibited. They are destroyed at the temperature of boiling 
water—the boiled potato is still starch and protein. All 
enzymes act best at certain temperatures. The enzymes of 
‘our body find such optimum temperature because of the 
capacity of the blood to maintain a temperature at which they 
work best. Enzymes are also governed by their hydrogen ion 
_ concentration. Enzymes that have an optimum reaction in an 
acid solution will become less active, or active not at all, in 
an alkaline solution. The mouth juices are alkaline, the 
gastric juices acid; we shall not expect to find the same 
enzymes in the mouth that we do in the stomach. 

Howell divides enzymes into the following seven groups: 
proteolytic or protein-splitting; amylolytic or starch-splitting; 
lipolytic or fat-splitting; sugar-splitting; coagulating (rennin, 
for example, which coagulates a soluble to an insoluble pro- 
tein); oxidizing, or oxidases; and deaminizing—whereby 
amonia, for example, is split from alanin, which is thereby 
reduced to lactic acid. 

The first four groups are the important digestive enzymes. 
But they are not confined to the alimentary canal. Presum- 
ably both fat-and sugar-splitting enzymes are present in the 
blood and other tissues, especially muscle. 

The fact that many enzymes exist in an inactive or zymogen 
stage both in secreting cells and after secretion and require 
activating before they function, suggests another interesting 
and important biologic phenomenon: the capacity of the blood 
and other tissues to form dissolvers or antibodies to foreign 
protein substances. We shall have a look at these antibodies 
presently; we now resume our voyage through the alimentary 
canal. 

During digestion, food is mechanically reduced to particles 
that can be carried in the watery fluid of the canal. In the 
canal, it is mauled about and churned up with the agents and 

149 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


reagents of chemical action. It is always meeting new phy: 
sical and chemical conditions. In the mouth food is mixed 
with saliva, of which we secrete from one to two quarts a 
day. It contains two enzymes (ptyalin changes starch to 
dextrin and maltose, maltase changes maltose to glucose) and 
mucin, a lubricator. 

Saliva is slightly alkaline; the gastric juice of the stomach 
is strongly acid and contains three enzymes: pepsin, splits 
proteins; rennin, coagulates milk and converts casein to 
paracasein; lipase, splits fats in emulsion, such as cream. 
The stomach, then, is the important digester of proteins, 
especially meat, flesh, fowl, fish, eggs, and milk. How the 
stomach can secrete a free acid such as hydrochloric from 
blood which is a neutral fluid, is as yet an unsolved mystery. 
It does. That acid is a fine antiseptic or disinfectant and 
checks bacterial growth, except that which causes acid fer- 
mentation. But too much acid makes for hyperacidity: gas- 
tritis, gastric ulcers. The flow of gastric juice is inhibited 
by emotional stress and pain, by anything which rouses the 
sympathetic nervous system to activity. 

When food reaches the intestine it has lost its looks and 
much of its nature—digestion begins in the mouth. In the 
intestine it loses everything it was as food for eye or mouth, 
to become something that a cell can use or spend. It meets 
with about a pint and a half of pancreatic juice: very alka- 
line, rather sticky, and charged with three enzymes: trypsin, 
leaves the pancreas as trypsinogen (a zymogen) and becomes 
trypsin in the small intestine; it is a proteoclast, breaks down 
proteins into their constituent amino-acids; amylase, acts like 
ptyalin, hydrolyzing starch to maltose; and lipase or steap- 
sin, which hydrolyzes or saponifies fats into glycerin and 
their constituent fatty acids. Lipase is also found in the 
mammary glands, muscles, liver, blood, etc. It seems that it 
also acts as enzyme in the synthetic processes involved in 
reconverting the glycerin and fatty acids of lard, butter, 

150 


THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


cream, oil, etc., into the kind of fat we store in our adipose 
tissue. 

Food in the small intestine also meets a secretion of the 
glands of the intestine, the succus entericus. That intestinal 
juice contains six enzymes: enterokinase, a zymogen which 
converts trypsinogen to trypsin; erepsin, completes any 
unfinished business of trypsin and pepsin; nuclease, acts on 
the nucleic acids of the nucleoproteins; maltase, converts the 
maltose and dextrin of starches to dextrose; invertase, con- 
verts cane-sugar to dextrose and levulose; lactase, converts 
milk-sugar to dextrose and galactose. 

Secretin is also an assumed constituent of intestinal juice. 
Its chemical nature is not known. It is probably not an 
enzyme. It seems to act as a messenger. Carried to the 
pancreas, it stimulates that gland to send its juice to the 
intestine. 

Food in the small intestine also meets the bile, a constant 
secretion of the liver, stored in the gall-bladder, and deliv- 
ered periodically to the intestine when needed. Bile is a 
thick, bitter, alkaline liquid. Its color, varying from golden 
yellow to dark olive green, is due to iron pigments from 
broken-down red blood-cells. Some of these pigments are 
returned to the liver via the portal vein; some are eliminated 
by the alimentary canal and color the excreta. Bile pigment 
which gets into the skin colors it yellow and is called jaun- 
dice, but is not infectional jaundice. 

Bile also carries two acids or “salts,” secretions of the 
liver cells. Their function is not definitely known. They 
are partly returned from the intestine to the liver and pre- 
sumably stimulate the liver to further activity. They prob: 
ably assist in turning fat into soap in the small intestine and 
so make its absorption possible. They apparently help dis- 
solve cholesterol. 

Cholesterol, a “solid alcohol,” is ingested with food, but, - 
as shown by Gall, can be synthesized by the liver. It occurs 

151 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


in every cell of our body, especially in nerve cells; it is 
found in the secretions of the fat or oil glands of the skin 
(in sheep’s wool also, and, when extracted, called lanolin) ; 
it is found in blood, milk, yolk of egg, kidneys, and adrenal 
glands. It stimulates growth of cancer. When it crystallizes 
in the human gall-bladder, it is called cholelith (gallstone) ; 
when in the sperm whale, ambergris. Why gallstones, and 
all that cholesterol is or does, are not well known; this is 
partly due to its stubborn resistance to biological and chem- 
ical reactions. 

“Synthesized by the liver’—I should have said “liver 
cell.”” Of which there are many many millions, for the liver 
is the largest gland in the body. Each liver cell is an 
“organ.” In each cell (according to Bechold) are 225,000 
million water molecules, 2,900 million crystalloid molecules, 
166 million fat molecules, and 53 million protein molecules; 
and each molecule bafflingly complex beyond power of 
description! That cell is more than a mere cell; it is a busy 
little world. No wonder that a liver which has to handle 
copper from worm-stills or copper vessels for twenty years 
gets discouraged and catches atrophic cirrhosis. The human 
liver is organized to deal with iron, sugar, etc., but not with 
copper. Presumably this copper hastens the break-up of red- 
blood cells. Too much pigment in the liver. The cells 
sicken and die. 

All in all, a normal adult pours about five quarts of 
digestive juices into his intestine each day. About four and 
one-half quarts of these juices are reabsorbed and presum- 
ably worked over again for secretion by the various glands 
of digestion. 

Why does not the intestine digest itself? Or tapeworms— 
they are in the presence of trypsin, a powerful enzyme? But 
juice of a dead tapeworm mixed with juice of the pancreas 
stops trypsin action. It seems as though the tapeworm has a 
substance which inhibits the action of trypsin; with that it 

ae 


THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


saves itself from being digested. Otherwise it could not stop 
the action of the enzyme. 

The alimentary canal does not digest itself because it is 
protected by the slimy coat of mucus secreted by its living 
lining cells. But when there is nothing in the canal for the 
secretions to work on and the pancreas is artificially stimu- 
lated to discharge its secretion into the canal, an irritation 
is set up as though brought about by digestion. 

Food begins to enter the large intestine about two hours 
after it passes the mouth, but not until about ten hours later 
has the last of the meal left the small intestine. The secretion 
of the large intestine is alkaline, contains mucin, but no 
enzymes. ‘The digestive enzymes from the small intestine 
continue if there is any unfinished business. The time 
required for food to make the entire canal journey is from 
twenty-four to thirty-six hours. 

The chief digestive change in the large intestine is prob- 
ably due to bacteria, the “intestinal flora.” These multiply 
so rapidly that about half the contents of the lower part of 
the large intestine are bacteria, excreted at the rate of about 
130,000,000,000,000 a day. They are of no known positive 
benefit. They may act. on otherwise indigestible cellulose; 
they may synthesize proteins from ammonium salts in such 
form that the protein can be absorbed; in which case they 
should not be outlawed, because bacteria are cheaper than 
enzymes. 

The small intestine also has its bacterial colonies which 
are responsible for ammonia and at least five kinds of intes- 
tinal gases. Their action is chemically not unlike that of 
enzymes; but whether bacteria are positively harmful in our 
alimentary canal is as yet a moot and unsettled problem. As 
the stomach is sterilized by the gastric juice, bacteria do not 
grow there and it is comparatively free of bacteria. But 
they may escape the action of hydrochloric acid inside solids 
or undigested particles, and so pass on into the small intes- 
tine, where they can grow. Bacteria are sometimes found in 

153 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


hens’ eggs; they got in during the hours the egg was in 
transit from the ovary and before the shell was formed. 


8 


Digested food in the alimentary canal is as useful to the 
body as when in the butcher shop or grocery store. It must 
pass from the canal into the blood before the body can eat 
it. This is called absorption. 

What is absorbed? What is a “square meal” when 
digested? Sugars and starches have become “simple” 
sugars; fats have become glycerin and fatty acids. Huge 
protein molecules of from 12,000 to 15,000 weight and con- 
sisting of a hundred or more amino-acid molecules linked 
together, have been dehydrolyzed into their eighteen to 
twenty constituent amino-acids and certain mineral salts. One 
of these salts may be silicon—invaluable for glass eyes and 
all glass; absorbed within the blood and carried to the eye, 
it is built into the crystalline lens. Only the diamond is 
harder than silicon. We cannot eat silicon; our digester 
finds it in milk and bamboo shoots. 

Alcohol, pepper, mustard, etc., are absorbed in the 
stomach; especially alcohol, and so readily that little of it 
reaches the small intestine. Water is not absorbed in the 
stomach, nor to any great extent in the small intestine; chiefly 
from the large intestine. 

The small intestine, with its sixteen square feet of absorb- 
ing surface, is the great absorber, as it is the great digester, 
of food. During absorption, the sugars and amino-acids 
pass from intestine to the capillaries in its walls and are 
then passed into general circulation? Not at all; they are 
carried by the portal vein to the great pool in the blood 
stream, the liver. We shall see why presently. During 
absorption, soaps, fatty acids, and glycerol are resorbed and 
are carried away as chyle to the lacteals of the lymphatic 
system and so into general circulation via the lungs. It is 

154 


THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


this neutral or “emulsified” fat that gives chyle its milky 
look, hence the lymphatics of the intestine are called 
lacteals. 

But how? The intestine is not a tube of blotting paper 
or of charcoal; its surface is a solid wall of living cells. 
How do these lifeless building-blocks get through that wall? 

Over a salt solution in a bowl place a layer of pure water. 
Salt molecules enter the top layer. This is diffusion. Water 
and oil do not mix; such a liquid is indiffusible. 

On one side of a membrane in a bow! place a salt solution; 
on the other side, pure water. Water molecules will enter 
the salt solution. This is osmosis: the less dense solution 
(water) will pass toward the stronger solution. Osmotic 
pressure lifts water from the soil to the top of the highest 
tree. 

On one side of the membrane place a solution of white 
of egg and salt; on the other side, water. Salt will leave 
the egg and enter the water until the concentration of salt 
on each side is equal. This is dialysis. 

These three laws of physics help us to understand what 
goes on during absorption. But there are difficulties. 

Why did the salt only leave the egg, why did not the egg 
also pass through the membrane? Egg is colloidal. Its 
molecules are too large to diffuse through membranes. 
Inorganic salts are diffusible: they are crystalloids; their 
molecules are relatively small. Digestion is largely a process 
of breaking !arge molecules into their constituent relatively 
small molecules. 

It is one thing to know that a certain organic compound 
building-block called an amino-acid is set free in the process 
of digestion; it is quite another question how this block gets 
through that wall of live cells. And still another question— 
and one of life’s deep secrets—how this or that cell builds 
that block into its own structure and at the same time stamps 
it with its seal of individuality so that it is now unique both 
for the species and for the kind of tissue it is in. What was 

155 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


a non-specific simple compound has now been synthesized 
by the cell into its own complicated specific self. When 
we learn how the cell does that, we may hope to build a 
living cell. 

Consider that the sugars, amino-acids, and fatty acids have 
passed that wall of living cells, what then? Much is known. 

The sugar or glucose is stored by the liver as glycogen. 
Why stored, why glycogen? Sugar is crystalline, soluble; 
if left in the blood, it would be washed out in the urine; 
glycogen is colloidal, insoluble. As a result of this storage, 
the blood sugar concentration may remain normal at one 
part in a thousand. When the body needs fuel, the liver 
reconverts glycogen to sugar and sends it out into the blood. 
Small amounts of glycogen are also stored in the muscles 
and all active tissues. Excess sugars are synthesized into 
fat. 

The fats are carried about by the blood and taken up by 
the tissues that need fuel; oxidized, they supply energy. 
When thus burned, the “‘ashes” are carbon dioxide and water. 
All fat not required is stored: adipose tissue. Fat. People 
get fat because they eat more sugars and fats than they use— 
and unless they contemplate fasting or fear starvation, they 
carry a senseless and an unnatural burden. 

For biologic oxidations, fats are relatively the most impor- 
tant foods. One pound of fat has a fuel value equal to two 
and one-quarter pounds of carbohydrates or proteins. 

No body is built, or kept alive and warm, without energy. 
The body requires enough energy: to keep alive (depending 
on age and other factors) and to run the digestive system 
(often called “cost of digestion”) ; to work; to keep in repair. 
Say 2,500 calories for a man of 170 pounds. Of these 
calories, from 10 to 15 per cent should be in proteins. If 
one does manual work, or loves to store fat, the calories may 
be increased up to 10,000. 

The sugars are carried to the liver first; so are the amino- 
acids, the raw material from which the body builds itself, 

156 


THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


with which it keeps itself in repair. “Repair” is not to be 
thought of merely as new tissue to heal a wound or new 
protoplasm to replace that being constantly shed by nails, 
hair, and the epidermis of the skin. There must be the raw 
materials for the building of new blood-cells, for glandular 
action, for hormones and enzymes, and for the eternal wear 
and tear of heart, nerve tissues, and all the organs which 
function ceaselessly until chilled in death. The blood is 
their environment. From the blood they must obtain such 
amino-acids as they require, when they require, and in proper 
solution. Too great concentration is fatal to certain tissues, 
fatal to heartbeat; too great concentration of the end-product 
of their metabolism, ammonia, is likewise fatal. The kidneys 
play their part, but they can be damaged by too much of 
the digested products as well as by too much of the end- 
products of metabolism. It is because the liver receives 
the amino-acids direct from the small intestine that they pass 
into general circulation slowly and in proper concentration. 
When the liver functions badly from disease, the amino-acids 
are fed into general circulation faster than the tissues can 
use them up; they escape in abnormal amounts through the 
kidneys. While amino-acids have no “threshold value” for 
the kidney filter, we lose little if they enter the blood-stream 
slowly. 

In the blood-stream, the amino-acids are carried about 
for the use of such tissues as require them. What is not 
required is normally broken down in the liver—“‘deamin- 
ized.” The non-nitrogenous element is then useful for fuel 
and may be converted by the liver into glycogen and stored. 
The nitrogenous element, ammonia, is turned into urea and 
handed over to the kidneys for elimination. 

When the body eliminates as much nitrogen as it receives 
in the form of protein nitrogen, the body is in “nitrogen 
equilibrium”: it is not burning flesh, but fuel. If the bal- 
ance is in favor of intake, the body is growing: “taking on” 

Lot 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


flesh. Flesh is not fat, although it can be burned as fat, as it 
is during starvation. 

Why so much bother? Why not eat glucose, glycerin, 
soap, and amino-acids, and save wear and tear of teeth, action 
of thirty feet of canal, and secretions of countless glands? 
Why not predigested food? Sounds reasonable. But try it. 
Try a meal of amino-acids. Even a rat will starve to death 
rather than eat a mixture of amino-acids. They are about 
as unpalatable as anything could be; in milk, ham and eggs, 
string beans, lamb chops, and the innumerable forms in 
which we ingest amino-acids, they are palatable. 

Even pure sugar as the sole source of carbohydrates would 
soon sicken us—nor could we taste anything else. Starches— 
in dozens of forms—are in themselves tasteless, but carry 
odors and flavors which make them appetizing. And as for 
a diet of fatty acids and soaps! Good butter is good, but 
its butyric, caproic, caprylic, and capric acids taste bad and 
smell worse. 

Further, foods in concentrated crystalloidal form would 
irritate the mucous lining of the canal and cause the blood 
to give up its salts to the canal. A bacterium cannot digest 
salt or sugar; salt or sugar can “digest” a bacterium, absorb 
its juices; but a bacterium can live in a weak solution of 
sugar or salt. 

In short, as McCollum (from whom I have drawn freely) 
says, it is neither possible nor desirable to nourish the body 
with predigested foods. But when it becomes necessary to 
resort to rectal feeding, predigested foods are necessary; 
otherwise they could not be absorbed, because the large 
intestine is little concerned in digestive processes. 

Life is protoplasm. Protoplasm is a solution—mostly 
water. Water comes before and after food in life. In all, 
from eight to ten glasses a day or the equivalent in water- 
laden food. If alcohol is consumed, less water is required; 
the end-products of an alcohol “jag” are carbon dioxide and 
water. This brings us back to the blood again. 

158 


THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


2 


There are more things in the blood than were dreamt of 
in Horatio’s philosophy or Moses could have imagined when 
he said that “the life of the flesh is in the blood.” Had 
blood been better understood in 1799, Washington would not 
have been bled to death to cure him. 

While it is important that we do not lose sight of the 
individuality of the body or of the organism as a whole, and 
the fact that parts, organs, even cells, as parts, organs, or 
cells, are meaningless, it is equally important to remember 
that the body is made up of cells. These cells have sur- 
rendered certain functions to groups of cells, tissues, and 
organs, but they are the ultimate living units of the living 
body; they must get their face next to food, air,.and water, 
and have their garbage removed. The blood performs this 
service. The blood is their physical and chemical environ- 
ment. It is an integrating organ to the extent that it keeps 
the cells at a proper temperature and furnishes them with the 
proper hydrogen ion concentration, the right kind of mineral 
salts, sufficient oxygen and fuel for energy requirements, and 
the proper amounts of brick and mortar for growth and 
repair. A single-celled organism has such matters in its own 
hands, but the cells in our body depend on the blood. The 
blood is their world; without the blood they are as hope- 
lessly isolated from life-yielding energies as would be a 
child on a cake of ice in an antarctic sea. The blood itself, 
without arteries, veins, capillaries, and lymphatics, is as 
valueless as spilled milk; it can function only in its own 
transportation system. That functioning depends, as does 
cell and tissue metabolism, on the fact that the membranes 
of cells and tissues have different degrees of permeability 
to different substances. 

In one sense blood itself is a tisswe; it has its own metabo- 
lism, it has its millions of living cells. But its main function 
is transportation; it carries that out through the transporta- 

159 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


tion or circulatory system. That system maintains a day 
and night service, remarkable as system and in the nature 
of the material it brings to the door of the myriad cells of 
our body. It does more than deliver: it collects poisonous 
wastes and hands them over to the kidneys to get rid of. 
That system breaks down with fatal results. 

A 160-pound man has about eight pounds, or four quarts, 
of blood. He may lose up to one and one-half quarts at one 
time and recover. Within a day or two he has as much 
blood as before; it may be a week before his blood regains 
its former composition. 

Under the microscope, blood is a pale yellowish fluid 
in which float two kinds of minute cells, the red and white 
corpuscles. The fluid is the plasma; 90 per cent water, 10 
per cent reduced groceries and meats, chemicals, drugs. It 
also contains many substances the physiologist is unable to 
make or to isolate. Whatever it is that the endocrines 
secrete, and whatever it is that enzymes are, the blood 
transports them. It also transports such gases as oxygen, 
carbon dioxide, and nitrogen; such inorganic salts as 
chloride, carbonate, sulphate, and phosphate of sodium, cal- 
cium, magnesium, potassium, and iron; such nitrogenous 
extracts as urea, uric acid, creatinin, ammonia salts, amino- 
acids, and phosphatives; many proteins; sugars, fats, lactates, 
and cholesterol; five or six antibodies, and special substances 
supposed to be concerned in the clotting of the blood. 

Blood issuing from an open blood vessel (or drawn from 
the body) clots, jells; this closes or seals the wound. This 
clotting is a unique process, though gums play a similar 
role in the vegetable kingdom. The very act of opening a 
blood vessel seems to set up a reaction in the blood itself. 
The blood contains an enzyme called thrombin (clot), which, 
in shed blood, activates a soluble fibrinogen in the blood 
to become an insoluble fibrin of very fine needle-like crystals. 

Fibrin collects at the wound and permits the passage of 
the watery serum, but holds back the red corpuscles and the 

160 





THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


platelets. They become enmeshed in the fibers, “‘clot’’; the 
- opened blood vessel is sealed, the flow of blood is stayed. 
But the white corpuscles squirm through the fibrin, as a 
snake does through a brush heap. 

Clotting may generally be hastened by hot towels or con- 
tact with any foreign substance, by rest, and by the poison 
from certain snakes. But the blood of some individuals 
clots dangerously slowly; they may even bleed to death from 
a slight wound. True hemophilia (bleeder’s disease) is said 
_ to be hereditary. 

Clotting can be prevented by a secretion called hirudin 
from the mouth glands of the pond leech; it is important | 
to a leech that its victim’s blood should not clot! It is 
important that our blood should clot when a blood vessel is 
injured. Presumably the adrenal gland is responsible for 
heightening the capacity of the blood to clot under certain 
psychological stresses. But a foreign substance, even a 
bubble of air, in a blood vessel may cause a clot, thrombosis. 
If the blood can absorb the clot, no damage is done; if not, 
and if the clot is carried to some point where it blocks circu- 
lation, it is fatal. A clot on the brain or in the heart is 
almost always fatal. 

The personal service of collection and delivery is made 
by the lymph, the body’s middleman, the final link in our 
transportation system. 

We rarely see lymph. Rarely hear of it until it goes 
wrong, then we know it as edema, or dropsy; if it is in the 
legs, as elephantiasis—legs as big as elephants’. Something 
stops up the lymphatics; lymph collects, the part of the body 
affected swells up with lymph. 

Lymph (water) is blood plasma that filters through the 
microscopic walls of the capillaries. It bathes the cells and 
effects exchange of materials, leaving behind what the cells 
need, carrying off what is not needed. ‘Then it joins the 
great drainage system whereby blood is returned to the heart. 

Lymph has its own system, lymph vascular system. This 

161 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


begins with minute lymph capillaries into which the lymph 
passes by filtration. These unite in larger vessels, the 
lymphatics; these empty into ducts which pour their contents 
into two large veins which unite to form the upper vena cava. 
Thus the blood has made a round trip: it is again in the 
heart. Before it is put into general circulation again, it 
must be aired. 

Why do we not all have elephantiasis? What keeps the 
lymph moving? Movement, for one thing. Every body 
movement alters the shape and size of many muscles. This — 
puts pressure on the lymph vessels, which grow larger toward 
the main ducts emptying into the veins. The lymph cannot 
flow backward—or downhill, as it should because of 
gravity—because the lymphatics are beset with valves, as are 
the veins, especially in the arms and legs. The valves lie 
flat against the wall of the vessels as long as the current 
flows in the right direction. Reversing the current forces 
the valves out and closes the tube. Lymph can only flow 
in one direction, toward the heart. 

In joining the larger lymphatics, lymph passes through one 
or more of our 700 lymph-nodes. Some are no bigger than 
pinheads, some as large as olive seeds. They abound in 
the armpits, groins, thorax, neck, and mesentery. They are 
not true “glands’’; they secrete nothing. But they are our 
good friends. They police the blood. Outposts held by 
sentinels that never sleep; always on the lookout for foreign 
substances, especially bacteria. 

In fact, a lymph-node is barbed-wire entanglement for 
bacteria; they never get beyond a node without a fight. The 
fight is bloodless, for neither combatant has any blood, but 
it is always a fight to the death. Then it is that we discover 
our lymph-nodes: the fight inside causes the node to swell 
with inflammation. We met such inflamed nodes in child- 
hood and called them “waxing-kernels.” ' 

The fight is between white corpuscles and bacteria. If the 
cells win, we hear no more about it. If bacteria win, they 

162 





THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


tell us. There is nothing so immodest or shameless as an 
average bacterium, or can do so much good and so much 
damage in proportion to its size. It can move mountains 
and destroy cities. 

If lymph is blood filtered through tissue, how do white 
corpuscles get into lymph? ‘The same way: they lengthen 
and filter through. We hear much of these white corpuscles 
or leukocytes (white cells). They are not well understood, 
nor is it known how many kinds there are, where they 
originate, how long they live, why they multiply—now 
rapidly, now slowly—and what finally becomes of them. 
Some are believed to originate in bone marrow, others in 
lymph-nodes. They lead a fairly independent existence. 

Presumably they break down dead tissue cells, carry fat 
from the intestines into the lymph and so to the blood, help 
stabilize the protein content of the blood, and possibly lib- 
erate a substance which assists in blood clotting. They may 
destroy the worn-out red cells in the spleen and liver. Some 
eat bacteria. 

Evidently bacteria au naturel are not palatable and some- 
what indigestible. One kind of leukocyte is supposed to 
remedy that. The blood plasma itself is credited with a 
substance which makes phagocytes, as the “eater-cells” are 
called, greedy for bacteria. This substance is called opsonin, 
Greek for “preparing a banquet.” With no opsonin in the 
blood, a phagocyte eats only one bacterium at a time; with 
opsonin, he takes them on in bunches, possibly because it 
causes bacteria to herd. The result is the same: the 
phagocytes engulf them faster. 

Injury to or inflammation in any part of the body sets up 
irritation. Blood hustles phagocytes up to the injured part; 
it gets red from the red corpuscles of the blood. If bacteria 
are present, a fight is on. If phagocytes win, they crawl 
back into the blood again. If they lose, the bacteria kill 
them and also tissue cells. Pus forms. Pus is dead tissue 
and white corpuscles, plasma from injured blood vessels, and 

163 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


dead and living bacteria. A scar on the neck may mark 
the spot where tubercular bacilli were held up by a lymph 
gland and lost a fight with phagocytes. 

Our “resisting power” is good when we have enough 
leukocytes. We generally have enough when our transporta- 
tion system is all in order. 


10 


The business of the transportation system is to deliver 
fresh blood—“pasteurized,” aérated, and heated to the 
proper temperature—to several billion cells twice a minute, 
every minute of life. That is big business and of vital 
importance; and no man-made transportation system comes 
within miles of it for honesty, accuracy, or efficiency. Nor 
has man yet made as fine a tube as an artery or as good a 
pump as the heart. 

Cut a thin section across a small artery and put it under 
a microscope. It has three coats of muscle. The fibers 
of the outer coat run lengthwise and are dense; they 
strengthen the artery, enable it to resist undue expansion, 
make it hard to cut or tear. ‘The inner or lining coat is 
extraordinarily smooth; the blood hustles on with next to no 
friction. The middle coat is in two layers of fine muscle 
fibers circularly interlaced; one layer is elastic, the other con- 
tractile. The thickness of this coat varies according to the 
trafic it bears; the larger the artery, the thicker its walls. 

With every heartbeat, every inch of artery in the body 
expands and contracts. In fifty years they have expanded 
and contracted about three billion times. When this middle 
coat clogs up with lime salts they harden, lose their elasticity. 
Arteriosclerosis probably increases the rate of flow in the 
arteries—but does not make for “high blood pressure.” Fat 
does. 

Arteries carry blood from the heart. The great artery, 
or aorta, leading direct from the heart, is about an inch in 

164 





THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


diameter. It soon branches; the branches branch; on and 
on; they become smaller, smaller, and finally discharge their 
tiny rivulets into capillaries so minute that it would take 
thousands of them to hold as much blood as the aorta. Even 
the corpuscles in the blood must travel through them Indian 
file, and at that it is often a tight squeeze. 

The heart is simply the central power house; the arteries, 
simply the tubes. But with the capillaries the transport 
system becomes a special service; without them, the blood 
could not do its big work. They form a vast network through- 
out the entire body except in hair, nails, cuticle, cornea of 
the eye, and cartilage; that is why cartilage is so white. 

The blood returns through veins, also tubes and very tiny 
at first where they begin to gather up the minute trickles 
after the blood has done its work in the capillaries. The 
tubes grow larger and larger as vein after vein keeps dis- 
charging its contents, and become at last the two great vene 
cave which deliver the blood to the heart. 

The heart is easily understood if one does not look at it; 
then it seems hopelessly complicated. Think of it as two 
pairs of cubes, one pair on top of the other. The two top 
cubes are shaped like ears, hence their name, auricles. They 
receive blood: the left auricle, from the lungs by means of 
the two pulmonary veins; the right auricle, from the upper 
and lower part of the body by the two vene cave. 

The two bottom cubes are round like little bellies, hence 
their name, ventricles. They expel blood: the left ventricle, 
to the body via the aorta; the right ventricle, to the lungs via 
the pulmonary artery. 

Why does the heart beat 75 times every minute? How 
does the blood know where to go? The second question is 
easy, the first is now being solved. But beat it does, from 
four months before birth until life snuffs out with its last 
beat. Forty million times a year. The work it does is 
literally staggering. More amazing is the fact that it will 
go right on beating after it has been removed from the body; 

165 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


kept moist in a neutral salt solution (sodium, calcium, and 
potassium salts) and fed a little sugar, it will beat for days. 
Muscle tissue cut from the body will also grow and beat 
rhythmically under stimulus, but there is an automatic action 
to the heartbeat which as yet has not been solved. 

The heart is striated and “involuntary” muscle—not 
under control of the will. Only the heart has this combina- 
tion. The result is a specific dynamic system which functions 
in connection with certain nutrients and ions. Seventy-five 
beats per minute is a normal average; but among the soldiers 
of a single company, all presumably normal and all under 
similar conditions, it was found to vary from 42 to 108. 

The heart beats according to its past as well as to its 
present experiences; emotions, diseases, narcotics, drugs, 
muscular activity, rate of metabolism, etc., all enter into the 
count. The bigger the body, the slower the beat: 25 per 
minute for an elephant; 50 for a donkey; 70 for men; 80 
for women; 90 for youth; 140 for a newborn; 150 for a 
rabbit; 175 for a mouse. The more active the body, the 
faster the heartbeat. I can save my heart 20,000 beats a 
day by remaining quietly in bed. It has been experimentally 
determined that when the pulse is forced up to 135 per 
minute, the subject becomes uncomfortable; above 160 it is 
very distressing and fairly unbearable, although one was 
recorded of 184 per minute. 

The blood-stream is kept to its course by valves. For 
example, blood returned from the body by the two vene 
cave fills the right auricle and the right ventricle: the two 
at the time are one chamber. The auricle contracts, forcing 
more blood into the ventricle below. As the contraction 
slows up, a valve between auricle and ventricle is forced 
shut by the pressure of blood in the ventricle. This ventricle 
now contracts, forcing the blood through the now open valves 
into the pulmonary artery and so on into the lungs. It is 
returned by the pulmonary veins, and enters the left auricle 
and ventricle. Left auricle contracts, distending the left 

166 





THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


ventricle; then the valve between them closes. Then the left 
ventricle contracts, forcing the blood into the aorta. After 
it has traversed the body it is returned by the vene cave to 
the right auricle. 

Around it goes. It cannot go astray, for it circulates in 
a closed system; valves in the heart and in the veins prevent 
it from going in the wrong direction. The heartbeat forces 
it to keep moving. The vasomotor apparatus, through nerve 
connections with the muscle walls of the arterial system, 
controls the amounts of blood flow to the various tissues and 
organs of the body. 

This transportation system must supply its own needs also. 
Arteries and veins are tubes of living tissue; they must have 
their blood. They receive it from their own system of 
arteries, capillaries, and veins: the vasa vasorum, blood 
vessels which supply nourishment to the coats of other blood 
vessels, 


Il 


The left half of the heart contains arterial blood; the 
right, venous. The walls of the two auricles are relatively 
thin; of the ventricles, thick—that of the left three times 
that of the right; it has three times as big a job. The left 
ventricle drives blood into the aorta with a velocity of about 
thirty feet a second. But before that blood returns to the 
left ventricle, it must make two long journeys. First it visits 
every nook and cranny in the body, and is returned by the 
vene cave to the right auricle. That completes the systemic 
or general circulation and requires twenty-three seconds. 

From the right auricle the blood passes down into the 
right ventricle, and by it is driven through the pulmonary 
arteries to the lungs. There it takes the air. It then returns 
by the two pulmonary veins to the left auricle, and thence 
into the left ventricle. That completes the pulmonary circu- 
lation and requires about fifteen seconds. The blood is now 

167 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


ready to be expelled by the left ventricle into the aorta, to 
be put again into general circulation. 

“Taking the air” is a vital process—in fact, no process is 
more vital; but before looking at it, let us see how the new- 
born prepares for that momentous first step, one of the most 
interesting adaptations in life. 

The four-months-old fetus is attached by its umbilical 
cord to the now fully formed placenta, consisting largely of 
connective tissue and blood vessels which interlace with 
blood vessels in the uterus. But there is no direct exchange 
of fetal blood with that of the host; only by diffusion through 
permeable membranes can the fetus derive nourishment and 
oxygen from its host’s blood vessels. This it does through 
the umbilical vein. Through the two umbilical arteries it 
delivers to the placenta the end-products of fetal metabo- 
lism—chiefly carbon dioxide, which diffuses from placental 
blood vessels into the blood vessels of the host and is by her 
eliminated in her lungs. 

After birth, the umbilical cord is tied and cut. This cuts 
off the newborn’s oxygen intake and carbon dioxide outlet; 
it must make vital rearrangements. Quick. 

A blood clot forms between the navel and the liver in what 
was the umbilical vein; that stops circulation in that direction 
and prevents the infant from bleeding to death. As a result 
of that clot, two blood vessels cease to function and pass off 
the stage forever. Another clot forms in the vessel which 
connected the aorta with the pulmonary artery; and it goes 
out of circulation. ‘Two other clots form; and two other 
vessels begin to obliterate themselves. 

One other change is necessary before the infant is a full- 
fledged air-breather. Up to the time of birth there is an 
opening between the right and left auricles, the foramen 
ovale. But with the closing of the vessel from the pulmonary 
artery to the aorta the blood is forced into the lungs, thence 
into the pulmonary veins, thence into the left auricle. 
Pressure in the left auricle closes the foramen ovale between 

168 





THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


the two auricles. It stays closed; thereafter there is no 
opening between left and right auricles. Sometimes it does 
not close tight; venous blood mixes with arterial. The 
result of this mixture is impure blood; cyanosis—*blue 
babies,” even blue adults. If the opening is too great, the 
mixture is fatal; not enough blood gets the air. 

This separation of the heart into right and left halves, 
thereby keeping venous from arterial blood, made constantly 
warm blood possible, and is found only in birds and mam- 
mals. Lower vertebrates have impure blood, and change 
their temperature with the thermometer. Failure of the new- 
born’s foramen ovale to close is a memento of reptilian days; 
death follows because our metabolic processes are set for 
pure warm blood. 

The clots and the closure of certain blood vessels and 
foramen ovale completely alter the newborn’s circulation; 
it must now get its oxygen by its own efforts. It draws its 
first breath. 

This is a big job for a small child. Lungs at birth are 
solid; they must be shaken out, filled up, as one would a 
balloon. The balloon the infant has to fill is several times 
larger than its body. Lungs are like enormously complex 
sponges—minute pockets or air cells, all opening into fun- 
nels, these into tubes or bronchioles, these into right and left 
bronchi, these finally into the trachea or windpipe. 

Trachea and bronchi are lined with the microscop:c 
chimney-sweep cilia. They move foreign particles up within 
reach of the coughing mechanism. When the cilia are 
damaged by bad-cold germs, we cough up floods of mucus, 
dead cilia cells. 

If the infant takes its first breath through its nose, it sets 
a good example for itself; that is what the nose is for. 
Internal-combustion engines work best if given warm air. 
The infant is such an engine. Its nose is like a scroll radi- 
ator, thereby exposing a large area of membrane to contact 
with its first and every breath. That breath drawn through 

169 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


the nose filters, warms, and moistens the air, important 
qualities for every breath. The nose prepares the air for 
the lungs as the mouth prepares food for the stomach. It 
“samples” air by the sense of smell, as the mouth samples 
food by the sense of taste. If the air is no good, we hold 
our nose; if the air is cold, the vasomotor system sends more 
blood to the nasal membrane. 

The infant is in contact with the air through the skin of its 
body. When its lungs are expanded, another surface is in 
contact with the air; this lung surface is from ninety to one 
hundred times greater than body surface. An average man 
has about one square yard of skin surface, about ninety 
square yards of lung surface. 


12 


After our first breath, our lungs are never again free from 
air. They must have thin walls, to let oxygen into the blood 
and carbon dioxide out; without air they would collapse. 
The passages leading to the air-sacs do not collapse, because 
they are held open by stout rings of cartilage. Even if 
removed from the body and punctured, the collapse of the 
small tubes entraps air into the air-sacs. Lungs that will 
float cannot have belonged to a stillborn; butchers call them 
“lights” —they are lighter than water. 

There are always about two pints of residual air that we 
cannot budge. But with great effort we can expel the sup- 
plemental air—about three pints. With no effort at all we 
inhale and exhale tidal air—about one pint. With another 
effort we can inhale about three pints more—complemental 
air. The maximum amount of air that can be forcibly 
expelled after a deep inspiration is about one gallon. This 
is vital capacity; it differs with individuals, and diminishes 
if we give our lungs no hard work to do. 

We breathe faster when a certain nerve center in the brain 
tells the inspiration muscles to speed up. The nerve gets 

170 3 





THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


its cue from carbon dioxide. There is always carbon dioxide 
in the blood, but it plays second fiddle to oxygen. When 
there is too little oxygen or too much carbon dioxide, we 
breathe faster. The air we inhale has 21 per cent of oxygen, 
.04 per cent carbon dioxide. The air we exhale has 16 
per cent oxygen, 4 per cent carbon dioxide, which means 
that in the lungs the air lost 5 per cent of its oxygen and 
gained 4 per cent carbon dioxide. No matter how cold and 
dry the inhaled air, the expired air is blood hot and saturated 
with moisture. 

A thin, moist membrane of the lungs separates air from 
blood. On the air side is a high percentage of oxygen. On 
the blood side, a high percentage of carbon dioxide. An 
exchange of gases takes place through the membrane. As a 
result, the blood brought to the lungs by the pulmonary 
arteries loses about 10 per cent of carbon dioxide; the blood 
carried back to the heart by the pulmonary veins gains about 
10 per cent of oxygen. 

It requires less than two seconds for the blood to take the 
air and exchange its crimson for a scarlet hue. Arterial 
blood is scarlet. If “blue” blood is a caste sign, certain 
shell-fish are the Brahmins of creation; their blood oxygen- 
carrier is not the iron of hemoglobin, but the copper of 
hemocyanin. This copper is blue in the crab and tastes like 
copper in the European oyster. 

Aérated blood begins its long round through the body as 
soon as it is shot into the aorta by the left ventricle. The 
blood delivers its oxygen as the iceman leaves ice—according 
to the needs of families on its route, making the round trip 
every half minute. An organ, gland, muscle at rest does not 
need much, but activity anywhere—in organ, gland, muscle, 
what not—means an extra supply. The heart itself will use 
twice the oxygen at one time it does at another. At meal 
times the intestines require extra large supplies. Even mild 
thinking causes the brain to double its usual demand. “Fast 
thinking” may even require fast breathing. Whatever con- 

171 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


sciousness is, it goes out like a candle when the oxygen is 
cut off. 

Oxygen. Oxygen. Everywhere we go, every time we turn 
around, always, as long as we live, the tissues of our body 
are crying for oxygen and freedom from carbon dioxide, 
else they choke to death. And our bellows keep working 
away: 60 breaths a minute for the newborn, 40 for the child, 
20 for the adolescent, 16 to 18 for the adult. About one 
breath for every four heartbeats is a normal average. 

The air we breathe is about 80 per cent nitrogen; as it is 
an inert gas, we absorb none of it. But under high atmos- 
pheric pressure, as in a diving bell or caisson, nitrogen is 
dissolved in the blood and in the tissues. If the pressure 
is suddenly released, the gas cannot remain in solution but 
forms bubbles, and the blood effervesces like a bottle of pop. 
(A nitrogen bubble lodged in a vital spot is as fatal as a 
blood clot.) This makes for stiff muscle joints—“bends,” 
the workmen call them. If the pressure is slowly relaxed, 
bubbles do not form, and the gas in the tissues is carried 
by the blood to the lungs and nitrogen equilibrium with the 
gases of the atmosphere is again restored. 

Equilibrium. The body is wonderfully balanced. Vital 
processes other than growth are equilibrizing processes. 
When the equilibrium is upset, the body begins to readjust. 
It works like a defensive army, massing its forces against 
the greatest dangers. The blood is the marvelous distributor, 
regulator, restorer, provider, of forces. When one thinks 
of the billions of individual cells the blood serves, it is truly 
the Little Friend of All the World. 

It is significant that too much carbon dioxide rather than 
too little oxygen sets the bellows working faster. If we are 
only short of oxygen we can fall asleep, even in death; the 
lungs rise and fall until the last. We can burn ourselves 
up slowly; but from the smoke of the fires of action we must 
be promptly delivered. 

Not, Give the lungs air; but, Give the air carbon dioxide. 

172 





THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


That purifies the blood. And if respiration cannot be 
resumed otherwise in an asphyxiated person, give his respira- 
tory center carbon dioxide—then it will order the lungs to 
action. But if the respiratory center is dead, it is too late. 


I3 


Abel withdrew from ‘one dog in one day twice the volume 
of its blood. The dog should have died twice, but inasmuch 
as the professor collected and returned all its red blood 
corpuscles, it lived. When he withdrew only 60 per cent 
of the dog’s blood and did not promptly restore the red 
corpuscles to its blood, it died. 

Our lungs are valuable, but we really breathe through the 
hemoglobin, or respiratory pigment of the red corpuscles. 
Blood plasma is complex; the red corpuscles, or erythrocytes 
(red-cells), are inconceivably complex. They are born in 
the red marrow of bones and have nuclei as have other 
cells. On entering the blood stream they lose their nuclei 
and assume their characteristic disk or muffin shape; they 
can no longer grow, and, after ten or fifteen days’ work, die’ 
and are broken up in the liver or spleen. In fishes, amphibia, 
and camels, the nuclei are not lost in the blood. 

Each red corpuscle is about 1/3200 of an inch in diameter, 
1/12400 of an inch thick. Yet they make up about 35 per 
cent of the volume of the blood—or enough to fill a pint cup. 
In a spoonful of blood there are about 30,000,000,000, or 
in an adult male about 25,000,000,000,000; a few billions 
less in an adult female. Her blood and her lips are no less 
red, nor has she less capacity to blush or acquire a red nose, 
nor has she less iron in her constitution; simply less body, 
and consequently need for less blood. Anemic persons have 
either fewer red cells or less iron in the cells they have. 
The proportionate number present at any one time varies 
according to many factors—constitution, nutrition, and 
especially with age, being most numerous in fetal life. In 

173 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


women, they increase in number during menstruation, dimin- 
ish during pregnancy. 

Red blood-cells carry oxygen. That makes them red and 
they make the blood red. They are soft, flexible, elastic. 
Had a camel these qualities equally highly developed, he 
could easily pass the needle’s eye. Carried by the blood to 
the lungs, they squeeze through spaces as small as the uni- 
verse is big, resuming their disk-like shape. With nothing 
between them and the air but a thin membrane, they detach 
oxygen and squeeze through into the blood again. They are 
small, but their combined surface area is nearly 4,000 square 
yards, with nearly 90 square yards of lungs for them to 
operate on. Of course, only a small portion of them are 
present in the lungs at any one instant. The blood lugs them 
about from cell to cell. Any cell needing fresh air then and 
there gets it; and gets rid of carbon dioxide, which the blood 
carries to the lungs. If it carries much we take a long breath, 
or several. 

While it has long been known that the hemoglobin carries 
oxygen, it has only recently been established that it also 
carries most of the carbon dioxide. According to Du Bois, 
sufferers from faulty circulation show lack of oxygen and 
excess of carbon dioxide; their blood does not move fast 
enough through the lungs for the red-cells to get rid of their 
carbon dioxide. When the saturation of oxygen in venous 
blood falls below 20 per cent, cyanosis results. 

Ordinarily, it is not lack of oxygen or excess of carbon 
dioxide in crowded rooms that makes for distress; it is the 
heat, humidity, and odors of unwashed bodies. Gases diffuse 
. through insignificant cracks in walls, around windows, under 
doors. It was the heat and humidity that were so fright- 
fully fatal to the crowd in Calcutta’s Black Hole, not lack 
of oxygen or excess of carbon dioxide. 

While the air we breathe ordinarily contains about .04 per 
cent of carbon dioxide, a submarine crew will work for days 
in air containing 2.5 per cent and suffer no ill effect. With 

174 





THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


5 per cent carbon dioxide in the air, we double our rate 
of breathing; when it rises above 8 per cent, we are in real 
distress. Further increase begins to slow up the rate of 
breathing, with death when it reaches 40 per cent. 

Too much oxygen is equally fatal. Ordinarily, air con- 
tains about 21 per cent of oxygen—more than we need or 
can use. Nor does breathing pure oxygen increase the 
oxygen-content of the hemoglobin (oxyhemoglobin). But 
pure oxygen at a pressure of three atmospheres (one for 
every thirty-three feet) leads to convulsions and death. 
Workers in caissons, diving bells, and submarines may die 
from oxygen poisoning in ordinary air at five atmospheric 
pressure; fifteen atmospheres is always fatal. 

At about 26,000 feet above sea-level, the oxygen concentra- 
‘tion falls to 7 per cent—a test for an aviator’s fitness. Even 
at 15,000 feet many suffer severe “mountain sickness” 
(anoxemia), and lose consciousness above 20,000 feet. But 
by compensatory action in heart and blood vessels, most 
people can soon become “acclimated” to mountain heights. 

Just how the respiratory pigment jettisons carbon dioxide 
and takes on a cargo of oxygen while in the lungs is no more 
known than just how an ameba or a cold potato breathes, or 
how the cells of the tissues of our body exchange carbon 
dioxide for oxygen. But they do, and we breathe easier. 

In one red blood-cell are unnumbered millions of millions 
of molecules of hemoglobin. Each molecule is of huge size 
and of such complexity as to baffle the imagination. Here 
is its supposed molecular formula: CzssHiz0sNi95SsFeOn21s; 
molecular weight, 16,669. Only three atoms of sulphur, one 
of iron. But iron is iron and a little of it goes a long way 
in the affairs of life—and leads to some amazing perform- 
ances. 

Most of hemoglobin is globin, a protein, as might be 
inferred from the nitrogen and sulphur in the molecule. The 
remaining 5 per cent is iron salts or hematin with a com- 
paratively simple molecular formula of CssHssNsFeOs. That 

175 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


hematin will crystallize we have seen; the crystals themselves 
are as specific for species as are starch grains. A horse’s 
hemoglobin crystal no more looks like that of a human being 
than a man looks like a horse; but a mule’s crystal is half- 
way between that of a donkey and a horse. Why not? There 
are such relationships as blood. 

Blood is blood and that of all mammals has the same 
constituents in about the same proportions. Yet blood is 
specific for different species, and the amount of difference 
suffices to prove that man is closer blood kin to Old than to 
New World monkeys. By means of a blood test it was 
proved that the malaria-carrying mosquito feeds on pigs and 
cattle as well as on man; by that test horse-meat has been 
distinguished from beef; blood on a cleaver proved to be 
deer’s blood, and not wild duck’s, as the man accused of ° 
poaching swore it was; and a stain was proved to be human 
blood after a lapse of sixty-six years. 

All of which opens up a large vein in life—ranging from 
murder trials to immunity from bacteria. 

Any foreign protein element in a blood-stream is a foreign 
body, an antigen. An antigen will provoke an antibody. A 
foreign red blood-cell is an antigen; the antibody it provokes 
is a hemolytic, a dissolver of foreign red blood-cells. Bac- 
teria in a blood-stream are antigens; the blood’s reply is 
four kinds of antibodies: opsonin, makes them tasty to the 
phagocytes; agglutinin, causes them to herd together and 
consequently likely to be engulfed in lots; precipitin, causes 
them to settle down or precipitate when held in solution; 
and lysin, which dissolves bacteria. Lysins, opsonins, 
agglutinins, precipitins, etc., are specific antibodies, chem- 
ical systems which induce specific reactions. When bacteria 
are agglutinated, thinks Jordan, their negative charge of 
electricity is reduced; they are thereby more subject to the 
precipitating action of salts. The net result of the action of 
the antibodies is to destroy the antigens or so alter their 

176 





THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


nature that they are more easily handled by the phagocytes, 
or police of the blood. 

Bacteria, red blood-cells, spermatozoa, even pepsin, 
injected no the blood-stream, evoke specific antibodies; one 
kills the bacteria, one dissolves red blood-cells, one disinte- 
grates spermatozoa, one neutralizes the enzyme pepsin. On 
this capacity of the blood (and of other tissues) to react to 
antigens is based the whole practice of acquiring immunity 
in bacterial diseases by the use of cell-dissolving sera. 

Is it human blood? If there is enough of it the question is 
easily answered; injected into the body of a rabbit, the rabbit 
dies. But suppose there is only a drop of it, or the decom- 
posed remains of one blood clot? The test is simple. Into 
a rabbit or similar laboratory convenience inject a non- 
lethal dose of human blood (or ape’s—they are so closely 
related they are almost twins). The rabbit’s blood develops’ 
a specific antigen for human red blood-cells—it is immune 
against human blood. To some of this rabbit’s immune 
serum add the “suspect,” and incubate; if there is a flocculent 
precipitate, the suspect blood is ‘hina (or ape) blood. 

Is it blood? There may be only a stain on the floor, a 
shred of stained cloth, or perhaps only one drop of water 
left in the bottom of the tub in which the suspected murderer 
bathed. Such tests for blood can be made. They depend 
on the ability of an inconceivably small amount of hemin 
to make itself known by showing its specific color when sub- 
mitted to delicate chemical tests. 


14 


Breathing is action in a mechanism and implies work; and 
that suggests heat. Only at absolute zero do molecules cease 
to vibrate. They cannot vibrate; they have no heat. Heat, 
in other words, is a form of energy. And a thermometer 
is a device for measuring its energy. 

For example, the heat under my tongue at this moment 

de ee7 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


suffices to expand mercury (raise its temperature) until it 
registers 98.36 degrees. The heat of the skin of my hand 
is not so great; it would be even less if I were making snow- 
balls. But the temperature at this moment of my body in 
general is not far from 100 degrees; call it 100 for short. 

Heat, as we saw, can also be measured in terms of cal- 
ories—one calorie being the amount involved in raising the 
temperature of about two pounds of water about two degrees. 
If my temperature is 100 degrees, my body contains a certain 
number of calories—heat or energy units. Suppose I drop 
dead; my body begins to cool. If it is in a warm room it 
will lose 550 calories within twenty-four hours; if in a cold 
room, 1,000 calories. Where has the heat gone? Where 
does the heat of a red-hot poker go? Same place. It has 
flowed out, radiated, been conducted. My dead body in a 
room with a temperature of 100 degrees would lose no 
calories—there could be no flow of heat, because heat flows 
only from a region of high to a region of low temperature. 
But suppose I am not dead yet, but have only lost a leg; 
my temperature remains about the same, but I have dimin- 
ished the calories in my body—I have less body. Heat 
would still be conducted from my body; there would not be 
so much heat to conduct. 

Heat, being a form of energy, does things, causes change— 
a rise in temperature, a change in state, a chemical change, 
etc. If I apply enough heat to it a piece of coal, its carbon 
finally combines with the oxygen of the air: it burns; I need 
apply no more heat—the heat developed by the oxidation of 
the carbon will suffice to continue the reaction until the carbon 
is all oxidized. 

Our daily intake of fuel-food is, let us say, 2,500 calories. 
Assuming that we are not taking on fat, but just holding our 
own, what becomes of these 2,500 calories? If at the end 
of the twenty-four hours we have neither gained nor lost 
weight,-and have added 2,500 heat units to a body already 
at a temperature of 100 degrees and it is still at that same 

178 


f 
‘ 
f 
{ 
4 
i 
' 





THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


temperature, these ingested calories must be somewhere— 
and they cannot be inside us. We lose them in two ways: 
radiation and conduction from the skin, about 73 per cent, 
or 1,795 calories; through loss of materials from our body, 
about 27 per cent, or 705 calories. Whatever leaves our 
body carries with it body-temperature heat. Thus through 
saliva, excreta, etc., we lose about 50 calories; through 
expired air, about 265 calories; and by sweat, about 365 
calories. These are all heat losses, means of ridding the 
body of the heat liberated in the 2,500 calories of ingested 
food. 

All this is simple enough. It is equally obvious that 
engines work best under certain temperature conditions. 
Motor engines must be protected from too great heat by 
cooling devices, airplane engines from too great cold by 
heating devices. A big tree will sweat a half-ton of water 
on a hot day to keep its temperature down. Our body engine 
will not work at all if our temperature varies a few degrees 
from normal. We freeze to death when we cannot make 
enough heat, and die of fever or sunstroke when we cannot 
get rid of enough heat. At 105 degrees enzyme action 
ceases through autodestruction, the brain engine cannot work; 
above 105 degrees, the brain begins to be destroyed. 

Which means that our body functions best at a certain 
average temperature. When our temperature varies more 
than 2.5 degrees from that normal average, our oxygen 
metabolism is upset and our body is abnormal. We birds 
and mammals are not so much warm-blooded animals as we 
are constant-temperature animals. 

How does our body so regulate its heat production and its 
heat loss that its vital parts are kept at a practically constant 
temperature? It is easy enough to see how ingesting more 
calories, taking more exercise and consequent burning. of 
stored calories, and clothing keep up warm enough though we 
are breathing the frosty air of 40 below zero; but how do 

179 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


we keep cool when the thermometer stands at 120—as they 
do in Death Valley? 

Simply by getting rid of more heat. 

Heat loss through expired air is fairly constant and little 
subject to change in outside temperature. Expired air is 
always warmer than inspired air; it is almost saturated with 
vapor. We expire about a pint of water a day; each gram 
of water vaporized required one-half of a calorie, 180 in all. 
To warm the inspired air consumed 85 calories. 

The blood is the go-between for all parts of the body. 
Heat generated in any part of the body will heat the blood 
that passes by. The water in the blood is the transporter and 
distributor of heat. But the blood also reaches about sixteen 
square feet of skin and about ninety square yards of lung 
lining. In both skin and lungs it comes close to outdoor 
temperature. Through the vasomotor nerves the supply of 
blood te the skin is under automatic reflex control. The 
vasomotor system, then, is the principal regulating mecha- 
nism. In air close to body temperature there can be but 
little loss of heat from skin by radiation and conduction; 
in cold atmosphere the loss will be excessive. The vasomotor 
system must arrange for compensation. The details are not 
yet known, but the results can be seen. 

Sweat, for example. We have about 2,000,000 tiny pores, 
or sweat-glands, in our skin, about 500 to the square inch, 
about 2,000 per square inch in the palms of our hands and 
the soles of our feet. Sweat is 99 per cent water, 1 per cent 
salt, a small portion being urea. An average man on a 
mild summer day will sweat about two pints. He can sweat 
as much as ten pints; in that case 10 per cent of his urea 
excretion would pass out through the sweat-glands. 

Cats and dogs do most of their sweating through pads on 
their feet. A dog also opens his mouth wide and sweat— 
in the form of saliva—drips from his outstretched tongue. 
Both dog and man also pant, thereby increasing lung ventila- 
tion. If the outside humidity is not great, panting increases 

180 





THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


the amount of evaporation of water from the blood in the 
lungs. 

In the dry air of Death Valley deserts, with the temperature 
at 120, we do not “sweat a drop.” We do; the sweat evap- 
orates as fast as it is secreted. On hot, moist days it 
evaporates slowly because air can only take up so much 
moisture. Moist air itself is a fine conductor of heat. Hence 
more sunstroke with moderate heat and great humidity than 
with great heat and slight humidity. 

Sweating, then, is an active transfer of fluid from inside 
the body to the surface of the body, where it is vaporized, 
a heat-consuming process. The sweat that is not vaporized 
drips from the skin, but, as Du Bois points out, it “removes 
no heat from the body except as it diminishes the weight 
of the body.” Sweating is a different matter from the mere 
evaporation of water from a non-sweating skin. 

When air temperature reaches 86 or more, or when ordi- 
nary vaporization from lungs and skin and the amount which 
can be lost by radiation and conduction falls below the 
amount of heat that must be eliminated, the sweat-glands 
begin to pour out water. Actual sweat is the body’s last 
resort in keeping down the temperature. A flushed face 
covered with sweat is a skin losing hot water because it cannot 
lose steam fast enough. Usually our skin is “slightly moist, 
moister than a dead animal, not as moist as meat in a butcher 
shop.” 

The actual secretion of sweat is controlled by sweat nerves. 
The secretion itself increases the heat loss. Rarely individ- 
uals are found without sweat-glands—icthyosis hysterix. 
They cannot work in summer or in heat where a normal man 
would sweat. In one well-known case even slight work would 
send the individual’s temperature up to 105 degrees. 

There is always blood in the skin. On warm days the 
capillaries are gorged with blood; if the air is not too hot, 
much heat is lost by radiation and conduction and by vapori- 
zation. On cold days the blood is withdrawn from the skin; 

181 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


as Du Bois says, we change our skin into a suit of clothes 
and withdraw the zone where the blood is cooled to a level 
some distance below the surface. 

This change in volume (and possibly in concentration) of 
peripheral blood is a matter of vasomotor function, but what 
part the hot and cold points in our skin play is not yet known. 
When air below 60 degrees strikes an unprotected body, the 
cold points are stimulated. They tell the muscles to shiver; 
that is their way of getting warm. Shivering is a heat- 
producing device. Presumably the blood itself has become 
more concentrated, water has been withdrawn; it is 
“‘thicker’”’——less heat is carried to the radiating surfaces. A 
man up to his neck in a bath of. 104 degrees stops sweating 
on his forehead as soon as one hand is plunged in cold 
water. Same reason. Sweat-gland nerves also work accord- 
ing to temperature stimuli. The cold point nerves now cry 
louder than the hot point. 

Heat production is a chemical regulation—action in 
neuromuscular system, action of food on metabolism; heat 
loss is physical regulation—sweat centers and nerves, vaso- 
- motor center and nerves, respiratory center, water-content of 
the blood. So marvelously do these mechanisms work in 
harmony, and so wonderfully are they co-ordinated, that 
Howell believes it necessary to assume the existence of a heat- 
regulating center in the brain. Where it is and how it works, 
if there is such a center, are not yet known. It is assumed 
that that center is upset during fever. 

Temperature above normal not caused by food, work, or 
outside temperature, is fever. The cause of fever is not 
known. 

We sometimes shiver during a fever. Fever disturbs the 
vasomotor system; the blood supply to the skin is reduced. 
This makes the skin cool. Its “cold points” are stimulated. 
The blood concentration is increased; this may be useful in 
overcoming the effects of toxins in the body. A rise of two 
degrees of temperature in one hour means an increase of 

182 





— oe I eS en a ee 





THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


fifty-eight surplus calories stored in the body. The body, 
as Du Bois puts it, has become a reservoir in which extra 
heat is stored; it is released when the temperature of the 
body falls two degrees. 

Subnormal temperature accompanies starvation; less heat 
produced because less oxidation. The body has run out of 
good fuel; it begins to burn itself; its proteins are not good 
fuel, they do not oxidize well. First to go are the glycogen 
deposits, next the stored fats. Intestine, lungs, pancreas, 
brain and spinal cord, and heart, go last of all, and in the 
order named. Heart last of all. Even the liver is of little 
use to a starving man but as firewood; half of it is burned 
up before the heart has contributed more than 2 per cent of 
itself to the smoldering flame. Twenty-five per cent of the 
blood of the body may be found in a normal liver; its activity 
releases much energy, it is a reservoir of heat. But robbed 
of its materials, it is an idle shop. The starving body burns 
it to keep the brain and heart warm. In all the world of 
warm blood there is nothing so dead as a cold heart. 


15 


Glands are no more unique in life than any other structure 
or organ evolved for living purposes. We find no glands 
in an ameba, but the ameba has a full set of test tubes for 
chemical reactions. At any rate, it oxidizes carbon for vital 
purposes and synthesizes dead into living protoplasm. A. 
cow also does that, and manages to get most of the neces- 
sities of life into her milk; her milk will rear a calf. 

Her body and ours are organic wholes, held together for 
reaction purposes by a nervous system, held together for 
growing and living purposes by the blood. Into that blood 
all the cells of the body dip their fingers for what they 
require; into it they dump what they do not require or what 
they have made that other parts of the body may require. 
So it comes about that certain groups of cells are organized 

183 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


to clear the blood of refuse, other groups to deliver to the 
blood or to the alimentary canal chemical reagents, Cee 
and regulators. 

These special groups of cells are called glands—Latin fat 
acorn. Any organ in the body which secretes something the 
body needs, or excretes waste which otherwise would be 
injurious to the body, is a gland. I keep moving my elbow; 
it does not wear out; certain glands secrete elbow oil. Bones, 
muscles, organs, all contribute to, all benefit by, the scheme 
of the secretions of glands. 

Our body contains literally millions of glands. Some are 
endlessly duplicated—sweat, oil, and intestinal glands; 
others are single or in pairs. Some always work; others 
work only part time. Some function only for a certain period 
during life and then slink away, like actors who appear dur- 
ing one scene only. Some serve a double function, like the 
liver and the glands of reproduction. Some secrete definitely 
known substances; others have no known secretion. Some 
have a canal or duct by which their secretions are delivered 
to definite organs; others are ductless. 

Our skin is thickset with two kinds of glands which have 
ducts or canals. About 2,000,000 sweat glands secrete 
water and so help to regulate our temperature. Fat or 
sebaceous glands, usually one for each hair, help to protect 
the body from cold and the hair from becoming brittle. 

Lachrymal glands secrete tears through ducts which wash 
and lubricate the eyes. A duct on the inner corner of the 
eye drains the dirt-laden tears into the nose, if not secreted 
too fast; then they spill over the eyelids. 

_ Our alimentary canal is beset with food-digestion glands. 
Parotids in the cheek, sub-linguals at the base of the tongue, 
and sub-maxillaries in the lower jaw, “make our mouth 
water,” preparing food for digestion and acting as a ferment 
to convert starch into sugar. The big glands of food digestion 
are the gastric glands, pancreas, and liver. The pancreas 
secretes ferments that digest fats, carbohydrates, and pro- 
184 


a i a ..e a 


THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


teins. The liver, largest of our glands, secretes bile, forms 
urea, and stores glycogen. 

The secretions of all these glands are carried by ducts to 
other organs or systems. They are known as the duct, or 
exocrine, glands. ‘They deal with the upkeep of the indi- 
vidual. On their proper functioning depend in general food 
digestion and the protection of the body from extremes of 
temperature and of the eyes from motes. But there is an 
important difference between the glands of food digestion 
and the glands which water the eyes, oil the skin, lubricate 
the joints, and regulate the temperature. Food-digestion 
glands secrete definite chemical substances, manufactured 
within the glands themselves. 

Some of these chemicals are manufactured in large quan- 
tities—hydrochloric acid, for example, by the stomach. 
Other chemicals are produced in amounts so small that they 
are only with difficulty discovered by the physiologist; such 
are the enzymes. ‘These chemicals are prepared by the 
glands from the nutrient solutions carried to them by the 
blood. It is their business to pick them out and combine 
them into such products as in the course of evolution they 
have become adapted to produce. They must be plentifully 
supplied with arterial blood. 

The primary function of the duct glands, then, is to keep 
the body fit and to supply it with tools for razing dead 
bodies so that their debris may be built into living bodies. 
To that extent they are concerned in growth and the proper 
functioning of the body mechanism. But the control of 
growth itself and the determination of the character of the 
body mechanism depend on other glands—the endocrines— 
whose nature until recently was not even suspected. 

The kidneys are not glands of secretion; they secrete 
nothing. They are excretory organs. Their function is to 
filter from the 500 quarts of blood which flows through them 
every twenty-four hours, poisonous nitrogenous wastes, salts, 
and enough water to carry them in solution through the 

185 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


ureters to the bladder. The kidneys are indirectly con- 
trolled by the vasomotor nerves, more directly by chemical 
stimuli in the blood itself. Increase of oxygen to the 
kidneys, for example, decreasés urine secretion. Substances 
such as urea are always filtered out of the blood by a normal 
kidney, but sugar, chlorides, and sodium are excreted only 
when the blood carries them in excess. In diseased kidneys 
the sensitive filtering membrane is damaged, and thus often 
valuable elements are filtered out from the blood to the 
detriment of the body. 

Abel believes that possibly his false kidney, by which he 
has filtered out red blood-cells, can be so perfected that the 
blood of the human body might be forced to pass through 
it, filtering out such poisons as, for example, corrosive sub- 
limate, which the kidneys themselves cannot remove, and 
other poisons which because of temporary kidney breakdown 
cannot be eliminated. 


16 


The little fleas which us do tease 
Have other fleas to bite ’em, 
And these in turn have other fleas, 

And so... . ad infinitum. 


“Flea” is any animal that lives on or within the body of a 
host and depends on that host for its food. All such are 
parasites. Eccles claims that half of all the animals in the 
world are parasites. 

The most numerous and deadly parasites come from that 
great half-animal, half-plant underworld known as bacteria. 
Second only in deadliness are some of the unicellular organ- 
isms of the animal world, the Protozoa. More annoying, but 
of quite a different order in their powers of destruction, are 
some of the lower members of the Metazoa subkingdom. 

To the extent that parasites live on or within us or find a 
temporary home with us, and to the extent that they are causes 

186 





THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


of disease and death, they are proper objects of our interest 
and fit subjects for our attention. Indeed, the claim has been 
made that natural death in man and higher animals is due to 
parasitic organisms. This probably overstates the case, but 
it is a fact that micro-organisms enormously influenced or- 
ganic evolution, that certain forms are constant menaces, and 
that no part, tissue, or function of our body is germ-proof. 
The menace is great because of their astounding capacity to 
multiply, constant because, like the poor, they are always with 
us. A pin-scratch may be as fatal as a rifle ball; careless 
handling of milk may plague a city. 

The general problem of parasitism is complicated. We 
shall look only at those parasites which are prone to infest 
the human body and are likely to cause disease. What are 
they, how are they carried, how do they enter our body, what 
damage or disease do they cause, and how may we be rid of 
them or acquire immunity? The answers to even these ques- 
tions are often interrelated. Malaria, for example, is not a 
bacterial disease, nor do we “catch” it—it is brought to us 
by a mosquito. Malaria, as a disease, is not to be understood 
without reference to its carrier and without a knowledge of 
the life cycle of the germ which causes malaria. Again, rats 
are not parasites, yet some of the deadliest scourges of the 
human race are rat-flea-borne diseases. Why are the rats and 
fleas immune to plague? And how do they carry germs? The 
venom of a cobra, the ricin of the castor bean, the toxin of 
diphtheria germs, are deadly. Are they related substances? 
Only in their disruption of normal human processes of living 
and in the similarity of the response our bodies make to 
such substances. 

It is true that no question can be raised regarding any one 
phase of any human process of living without removing the 
lid of all of life. The intricacy of life in its simplest forms is 
profound enough; it is not simplified by the addition of para- 
sites. And yet possibly all living processes in higher organ- 
isms are brought about by aggregates of protein molecules 

LS) 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


which function as micro-organisms. If we only knew more 
about the protein molecule! 

We shall, for keen minds are on its trail, and sooner or 
later it will yield its secret and life will be new again. 

Meanwhile, there are mosquitoes to swat. And with them 
we may begin to call the roll of our parasitic enemies. Mos- 
quitoes belong to Hexapoda (six-footed) insects, the most 
diversified, the most numerous, and for their size the smartest 
of all animals. Lice, fleas, ticks, bedbugs, jiggers, mosqui- 
toes, flies—dozens of kinds, millions of each. And a variety 
for every plant and animal on earth big enough to carry one. 
They live on us, they live off us. They give us nothing useful. 
They irritate us. But they do not killus. We are accustomed 
to them, “adapted,” immune. 

That is what immunity means. We are not exempt from 
fleas or dozens of other parasites. Only immune. We can 
stand them. The germ of death or disease carried by a para- 
site is another matter. Immunity may come in many forms. 

Insects are the highest animals which infest or bedevil the 
human body. Lower in the scale is a flatworm, the long, flat 
Taenia, or tapeworm. Its life history is longer and not at 
all flat. Man gets it from unsalted, uncooked pork. In his 
alimentary canal it loses most of its anatomy and becomes 
head and long body of dozens of segments, each for breeding 
purposes a complete male and female. That is what it is, a 
series of reproductive units. It needs no sense organs, has 
none; as it feeds on predigested food it needs no digestive 
apparatus, has none. Its head is a hook to hang on by and 
a siphon to suck up food. 

Our next lower animal parasitic enemies are the two 
threadworms—hookworm, trichina. The trichina is well un- 
derstood and now under control; we hear little of it. The 
hookworm is well understood; but people will go barefooted. 

The trichina lives coiled up in its cyst within a muscle cell 
—rat, cat, dog, pig, man. There may be 80,000 cysts in one 
ounce of ham: half males, half females. Eaten by man, 

188 


as ne a: 


— 


a ee ee eee ee a 


gee. 


ee es a ee ae 


THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


the cysts dissolve in the gastric juice, the worms are free. 
They mate. One female produces 1,000 young. The young 
break through and settle down in muscle cells—100,000,000 
of them in one dead man. 

Hookworm continues to claim its millions of victims each 
year simply because proper precautions are not taken to break 
the vicious circle of its life cycle. It is another case of 
Parasites Lost and Parasites Regained, in the words of a 
Fijian school boy who, according to Dr. Vincent, had heard 
about hookworms and Milton the same day. Hookworm eggs 
hatch in warm, moist soil. The tiny worms enter the skin of 
the bare feet, are carried by the blood to the lungs, where they 
bore through into the throat, and thence are borne to the ali- 
mentary canal, where 500 or more live parasitic lives attached 
to the wall of the small intestine. Their millions of eggs are 
returned to the soil to begin other cycles. : 

Lowest of real animals to infest us are certain unicellular 
Protozoa. One group, the Sporozoa, is exclusively parasitic; 
and all are internal, hence often called endoparasites. Some 
abide in the liver, some in the intestine, some in the muscles, 
some in the blood of their host. Some are deadly enemies 
of the human race. Only bacteria are more widely distributed 
and few germs have more plagued the human race than the 
Sporozoan Plasmodia which cause malaria. Of the Sarco- 
dina Protozoa, only the endameba is a real parasitic enemy 
and in the tropics fairly destructive by causing dysentery. 
A similar but smaller ameba makes its home in our mouth 
and is always found in pyorrhea (pus-flow) lesions, though 
it is not yet certain that it causes pyorrhea. Only one genus 
of Infusoria is parasitic for man, causing diarrhea and dysen- 
tery. Of the fourth Protozoan group, the Mastigophora, only 
the Trypanosomas are parasitic—and cause the deadly sleep- 
ing-sickness and allied diseases. 

Below the lowest animals and below the lowest plants is that 
half-plant, half-animal underworld of bacteria. But before 
we turn to them, let us see how certain germs are carried bv 

189 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


animals—flies, fleas, rats, etc. Incidentally, we shall see into 
the breeding habits of certain germs. 

The Black Death of 1348-49 devastated a quarter of 
Europe, killed 25,000,000 people, and drove Boccaccio out- 
side the walls of Florence, where he whiled away the time 
writing the Decameron. In India, the pest bacillus cost 
6,000,000 lives in ten years. Almost all plague bacteria are 
carried by animals, and are transmitted to man by fleas, lice, 
mosquitoes, or other parasites. 

A flea on a dying rat seeks a fresh victim, carrying the rat’s 
plague germs with it. Any man will do. The flea empties 
its alimentary canal, then bites; the bite irritates the skin, the 
man scratches it—thereby opening his first line of defense to 
the enemy! The germs left behind by the flea can now get 
into the blood. In the new host they begin to multiply. An- 
other flea may carry this tainted blood to another human 
victim. 

More instructive is the propagation of malaria, or ague. 
When science found out where the mosquito gets malaria and 
why the astounding clock-like regularity of the paroxysms 
which wrack the bones with chills and burn the body of the 
victim with fever, a long stride was made in making this 
world safe for human beings. 

Malaria is caused by three (possibly by four) varieties 
of Plasmodia of the unicellular Sporozoa. Sporozoa repro- 
duce by spores, hence the name. Ordinarily, one cell or one 
bacterium divides and becomes two. In reproduction by 
spores, one divides into many tiny spores, each spore grows 
to life size, and again divides into spores. Each kind of 
Plasmodium has its own time rate of reproduction. The ague 
paroxysm coincides with this reproductive cycle. 

The true home of Plasmodia is human red blood-corpus- 
cles. Within, they grow to maturity at the expense of the 
corpuscle. They then begin to divide and become a mulberry- 
shaped mass of small, glassy, ameboid spores. This mass 

190 


THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


rends the corpuscle apart. The spores thus freed attach 
themselves to other corpuscles and begin a new life cycle. 

The rending of the corpucles releases their toxic wastes 
into the blood-stream, hence the fever; their destruction of 
the oxygen-carrying constituent of the blood results in anemia 
—and pernicious at that, without quinine. 

The estivo-autumnal or quotidian (daily) Plasmodium 
completes its life cycle every twenty-four hours. Each cycle 
releases from six to eight spores or new parasites. It is the 
most pernicious of all forms of malaria. The tertian life 
cycle is complete in forty-eight hours, at which time it is about 
twice the size of a normal red blood-corpuscle; from twelve 
to twenty-four spores are released; the chill occurs every other 
day. The quartan variety breaks from the corpuscle at the 
end of seventy-two hours, with eight spores and the attendant 
paroxysm; the attacks are every third day. 

In other words, once any one of the three varieties of 
malaria germs has entered the blood-stream, it propagates 
itself by spores and without sex, asexually. The existence of 
its progeny is dependent simply on the supply of red blood- 
corpuscles. But how does it get into the blood in the first 
place? 

Enter the Anopheles mosquito, of which there are several 
varieties. They can generally be distinguished from mere 
mosquitoes by their approach. A’ mere mosquito on land- 
ing humps its back, but holds its body parallel to the surface 
on which it lights; the Anopheles lands with its head down 
and body straight out at an acute angle with the surface. 
The mere mosquito drills with its head for lever; the Anoph- 
eles pushes in its siphon with its entire body. 

It siphons up the blood of an ague victim. Also minute 
Plasmodia spores. These are killed in the digestive juice of 
mere mosquitoes, but begin a sexual life cycle in the Anoph- 
eles. In this phase of development the Anopheles is the 
true, man the intermediate, host of the Plasmodia. 

The spores, in the Anopheles, develop into males or 

191 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


females. The males develop fine thread-like processes. One 
of these enters a female spore, fertilizes it. The now “mar- 
ried’’ spore enters the wall of the mosquito stomach, becomes 
encysted, grows; the mosquito’s stomach looks as though 
covered with warts. The full-grown “wart” now breaks up 
. into spores, each of which produces myriads of minute 
thread-like bodies. These are carried to all parts of the 
mosquito’s body, even 10,000 in its salivary glands. 

The mosquito bites a human victim, discharging saliva and 
a few thousand thread-like spores. In man’s blood they can 
take care of themselves. They enter an asexual cycle. They 
soon become incredibly numerous. Assume that the mosquito 
left only 1,000 spores: by the tenth day they have become 
100,000,000; two days later, 1,000,000,000. When 150,- 
000,000 blood-corpuscles have been invaded, fever begins. 

There may be double, even triple, infections—from suc- 
cessive infections of the same type or from infections of 
two or more types. Quartan fever, for example, may be 
simple, double, or triple. In severe infections there may be 
more Plasmodia than there are red blood-cells. 

The germs of trench and typhus fevers are carried by 
“cooties.”” Typhus fever alone killed 120,000 Serbians dur- 
ing the war—all inoculated by lice. When control measures 
were inaugurated, the fever disappeared. But true control 
cannot come to stay until the facts of propagation are known. 
In 1915 there were 2,500 cases of malaria in an Arkansas 
town; within three years there were 73: reduction of 97 per 
cent. Formerly, yellow fever lived in the tropics and now 
and then visited our Southern ports, with great loss of life. 
It is almost forgotten now. Controlled by controlling its 
mosquito carrier. In December, 1918, control measures 
began in Guayaquil, Ecuador, with 88 cases; they fell by 
months: 85, 43, 17, 2, 0. None since. 

But many kinds of germs need no lower animal agency 
to help complete their vicious life cycle; mere human social 
relations suffice. The very manner of our living is sometimes 

192 


THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


a factor in the presence of germs—and in our susceptibility 
to their ravages. As Jordan says, tuberculosis is primarily 
and chiefly a disease of men living in houses and of cattle 
kept in stables. A tubercular patient may expectorate up to 
3,000,000,000 tubercle bacilli in one day; the dried sputum 
in a cool, dark corner may contain virulent germs for eight 
months. A few drops of urine may contain up to 500,- 
000,000 typhoid bacilli. 

The typhoid bacillus, for example, before death overtakes 
its host, passes into the body of another victim, carried by 
milk, water, food, fingers, filth, flies. If it passes the acid 
stomach of the new host, it has a clear field ahead until it 
reaches the lymph-nodes of Peyer in the small intestine. 
Whether it kills and so dies with its host, or is killed by the 
leukocytes in the blood, it has already multiplied into an 
army and has already sent some of its forces out to find new 
victims. The germs of dysentery, cholera, etc., of the ali- 
mentary canal, have similar cycles. But they must all be 
carried; they no more “pass” from one victim to another 
without a carrier than a letter crosses the sea without a carrier. 

Many disease-producing germs which make their homes in 
our nose, throat, or lungs (germs of tuberculosis, diphtheria, 
pneumonia, scarlet fever, influenza, measles, whooping-cough, 
pneumonic plague, etc.), may be carried by the air itself, and 
generally are sneezed or coughed out to be wafted about 
until they find new hosts. 

During the Spanish War there was a case of typhoid for 
every seven American troops, a death for every 71; in the 
World War, there was one death for every 25,000 American 
troops. In the old pre-antiseptic days, childbed fever mowed 
down motherhood and in many hospitals regularly killed 
practically all mothers. Death from childbed fever is now a 
dark stain on a hospital’s reputation. Deaths from typhoid 
are still too common. 

The conquest of germ diseases has only just begun. But 
the start of that conquest might have been delayed until the 

193 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


sweet by-and-by without the discovery of the germs them- 
selves under the microscope. 


17 

In 1683 there lived a curious Dutchman who ground lenses. 
He scraped some tartar from his teeth, mixed it with water, 
and examined it under his lens. What he saw was a more 
astounding sight than that which confronted Balboa, who, 
from his peak in Darien, saw a lot of water. For ages man 
had known of the Pacific Ocean and millions of men had 
sailed its deeps; Leeuwenhoek, the Delft lens-maker, was the 
first human being to see a bacterium. 

And the world promptly forgot him and continued for a 
century and a half to argue “spontaneous generation” and 
to exorcise devils as causes of disease. It remained for 
Louis Pasteur (1822-95) to prove the part bacteria play in 
decay, putrefaction, fermentation, and many other processes 
until then hidden from the ken of man. Koch, in 1876, 
proved the causal relation between the bacillus anthracis and 
the disease anthrax, and in 1882 invented the “‘solid culture- 
media” for the study of bacteria. Pasteur founded a new 
science—biology; Koch revolutionized man’s attitude toward 
the world and gave the human race its first rational theory 
of disease. 

The naming of bacteria is still haphazard and much con: 
fusion prevails. But bacteriology is a new science, its inherent 
difficulties have been great, its progress marvelous beyond 
conception to the surgeons of Napoleon’s armies, who as- 
sumed that pus was the first and necessary step toward recov- 
ery from a wound. Some bacteria bear the name of their 
host, some the name of their discoverer, some the name of 
the disease they cause. Some bear all the traffic allows—for 
example, Granulobacillus saccharo-butyricus mobilis non- 
liquefaciens. 

All bacteria show a fairly definite character and are either 

194, 





THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


pathogenic (disease-producing), zymogenic (ferment-produc- 
ing), saprophitic (decay-producing), or chromogenic (color- 
producing). But the line between bacteria which cause 
disease and those which do not is far from sharp. Many 
variable factors determine which bacteria are pathogenic, 
when they are pathogenic, and for whom. 

Bacteria are so small that almost nothing of their anatomy 
is known but their shape, and that changes according to 
circumstances. They not only vary during their life cycle, 
but as individuals; even abnormal and monstrous forms are 
found. 

According to Jordan, all bacteria are inclosed within a 
cell wall or capsule, which looms up under the microscope 
like a halo. As this capsule is not cellulose, bacteria are not 
true plants. Which means nothing, for many sure plants are 
more like true animals than they are like true plants. It is 
in the nature of living beings that there can be no sharp line 
between the lowest plants and animals. 

According to outline, three forms of bacteria are recog- 
nized: rod-shaped, bacillus; corkscrew-shaped, spirillum; 
round-like-a-berry, coccus. But these names give no clue to 
their character; noxious and innoxious bacteria are equally 
indifferent to how they look under the microscope. The cocci 
are also called micrococci (small berries). Some cocci 
divide in one plane and go in pairs like Damon and Pythias, 
or form chains, and are called streptococci; some divide in 
two planes and form flat sheets or clusters like a bunch of 
grapes, and are called staphylococci; some divide in three 
planes and form cubical bundles, and are called sarcine. 
There are also strepto-bacteria, traveling like chain-gangs. 
But bacilli and spirilla divide at right angles to their long 
axes and generally lead detached lives. Up to 1900 there had 
been identified and named 1,272 genera of bacteria, divided 
as follows: bacilli, 833; cocci, 343; spirilla, 96. 

Because rather sharply differing from both bacilli and 
cocci, Jordan believes the spirilla group should be put into 

195 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


a class by themselves and called spirochetes (coil-bristle). 
_ They are long, spiral, and thread-like; some ten times the 
length of a red blood-cell. To this group belong the germs 
of syphilis (treponema pallidum), yellow fever (leptospira 
icteroides), yaws, infectious jaundice, and relapsing fever. 

The average bacterium is about 1/20,000 of an inch long. 
The influenza bacillus is about half that size; the germ of 
infantile paralysis is smaller yet. One hundred thousand 
typhoid bacilli could lie snug in the space of a match; 15,- 
000,000,000,000 of them to the ounce! A red blood-cell is 
pretty small, but it is as big as a pea when magnified by the 
diameters necessary to raise an influenza germ to the size 
of a needle-point. The smallest visible bacterium is 18/100,- 
000,000 of an inch in diameter; the ultramicroscopic or 
filterable bacteria (viruses) are one-tenth that size; that is, 
they are only half the shortest wave-length of any visible 
light-ray. Under the ultramicroscope, such objects may be 
seen, but merely as luminous points without difference as to 
size, shape, or structure. About forty filterable viruses are 
known to exist, but nothing is known of the germs themselves 
except that they pass through filters and can be very destruc- 
tive. Among them are, presumably, the germs of smallpox, 
dengue fever, trachoma, infantile paralysis, measles, hy- 
drophobia, influenza, and foot-and-mouth disease. 

All bacteria have some power of locomotion. The typhoid 
bacillus can make about a tenth of an inch an hour, or 2,000 
times its own length. Some travel faster—so fast that if we 
could move as fast in proportion to our size, we could run a 
mile a minute. 

Bacteria show amazing vital capacity. They can defy 
hours of boiling water; their spores can resist a temperature 
of 212 degrees. Some sulphur bacteria haunt hot springs in 
water at 190 degrees. Some multiply at freezing point. Ty- 
phoid and diphtheria germs will live for days in a tempera- 
ture of liquid air (284 below zero). Some bacteria have 

196 j 


yr a, A" rtel-nge a 
AT A i ee OL oe ht Sin hae Oe a ne 





THE PROCESSES OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


been known to defy liquid hydrogen temperature (464 below 
zero). 

Even more astounding is their capacity to multiply. One 
becomes two by simple division. The germ of Asiatic cholera 
can divide every fifteen minutes. Within twenty-four hours 
one could become 78,700,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,- 
000; but the victim is usually dead in less than twelve hours, 
killed by the toxins of these prodigious workers. In grow- 
ing and dividing, they have consumed food and liberated 
carbon dioxide. They are foreigners in our system, living at 
our expense and leaving their toxic garbage for us to elim- 
inate. 

The air we breathe and the food we eat are full of bacteria, 
and our body is covered with them. This is not literally true, 
but it is true enough to emphasize the question: why are they 
not always and more promptly fatal? Many factors enter into 
the case. For example, an entire group of bacteria live on 
our skin, where they are harmless. A scratch or a pinprick 
opens the skin. Now they are inside our body, but the only 
damage may be a boil or a pimple. Boils are usually not 
contagious and rarely fatal. ° Sometimes they are. It de- 
pends. 

The hay bacillus is everywhere; in the air, water, soil; 
probably some in the dust which my eyelids keep wiping from 
my eyes. If I am in a weakened or run-down condition, this 
bacillus may lead to a serious infection in my eye. Ordina- 
rily, nothing happens. The hay bacillus is a parasite, at 
home wherever it lands; it has established equilibrium with 
its host. As Jordan says, the less completely: adapted the 
bacterium is to its host, the more virulent the disease. Old 
diseases decrease in severity, increase in frequency. 

Hence the really dangerous pathogenic bacteria as a rule 
do their damage in short time; they are not adapted to live 
in their host; they kill. To kill the hand that feeds one is 
not biologic adaptation. How and why bacteria injure us 
are again dependent on many factors. But we may recognize 

197 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


two general ways: by specific toxins locally released (tox- 
emia); by invasion of blood-stream or tissue and resultant 
damage due to general bacterial activity (bacteremia). 

Diphtheria and tetanus are good examples of toxemic dis- 
eases. They are localized; the toxin liberated is specific 
and highly poisonous. Syphilis is a good example of a blood- 
poisoning disease; at first localized, the germs soon enter the 
blood-stream and from the blood may affect different tissues 
or organs. Pneumonia and typhoid are tissue diseases pri- 
marily, but the bacteria are present in the blood also. Sep- 
ticemia may be due to other causes than the invasion of the 
blood by the bacteria of suppuration. 

What is toxin—for man or bacterium? In the body of a 
man or an ape the bacillus of leprosy finds food and raiment; 
in the body of a dog or a cat, a tomb. An anthrax bacillus 
will not grow in a solution of corrosive sublimate stronger 
than one part to 300,000; it will not live if the solution is 
one to 1,000. As for bacterial poisons, the only general state- 
ment that can be made is that they are very poisonous. 
Tetanus toxin is 16 times more fatal than cobra venom, 120 
times more fatal than strychnine. To put it another way, 
the minimal fatal dose of strychnine is thirty milligrams; of 
tetanus toxin, one-fourth of a milligram. 

Certain plant toxins show resemblance to bacterial toxins. 
One gram of ricin (from the castor bean), properly diluted, 
contains lethal doses for one and one-half million guinea- 
pigs. Ricin agglutinates their red blood-cells; but first there 
is a period of “incubation” for the ricin, and an antibody 
(antiricin) is formed. Such chemical behavior and physical 
action of ricin are strikingly like those of bacteria. But this 
gives us no clue to the chemical structure of bacterial toxins. 
They are colloidal, presumably, and in many respects suggest 
enzymes in their action. In the fact that they do evoke anti- 
bodies (antitoxins) lies most of the secret of their control up 
to the present time. 

Which brings us up to immunity. But note, first, that there 

198 


THE PROCESS OF LIVING AND THE GERMS OF DISEASE 


are many kinds of immunity—and back of all the same 
principle: I am either immune or I am not. If I take it or 
catch it, I am not immune; if I do not take it or catch it, I 
am immune. But I may go down with it to-morrow! In other 
words, there are variable factors which will determine my 
predisposition to infection or my power of resistance against 
infection: age, hunger, thirst, fatigue, exposure to extremes 
of heat and cold, are such variable factors. 

Even different strains of bacteria vary in their intensity: 
diphtheria and influenza, for example. There are mild epi- 
demics, there are severe epidemics. Again, certain diseases 
seem to predispose toward invasion by the germs of other 
diseases. . Acute tuberculosis may follow on the heels of 
measles; streptococci may invade lungs already occupied 
by tubercular bacilli. Typhoid fever and pneumonia, diph- 
theria and scarlet fever, syphilis and gonorrhea, are well 
known combinations of diseases. 

Trypanosoma, the germ of sleeping-sickness, is carried by 
flies from animal to animal. The disease is almost regularly 
fatal; it cost Uganda 200,000 human lives, the Congo Basin 
500,000. One infected animal sent to the Transvaal started 
an epidemic among the cattle; 15,000 died. 

Why any animals left, then; or any flies? The tsetse fly 
which carries the trypanosoma is immune, as are the wild 
animals which live in Central Africa. But let an outsider— 
dog, horse, man—venture in! Outsiders are not immune; 
their blood has no answer to sleeping-sickness; they die, un- 
less they can get Bayer’s “205.” 

So it was with Texas fever: the new cattle died. So it was 
when whites introduced such “simple” children’s diseases 
as measles, croup, whooping-cough, to South Sea Islanders 
and to American Indians. They were not immune. Their © 
bodies had not yet learned the art of compounding anti-toxins 
to new toxins. They died—“like flies.” 

Which means that immunity itself is a relative term. We 
are all susceptible under certain conditions; we all have more 

199 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


or less power of resistance. To some bacteria we are natu- 
rally immune; to others we are naturally susceptible. The 
problem is to acquire immunity. How can we get exemption 
from disease? 

By having smallpox we acquire immunity from smallpox; 
also by vaccination. Against typhoid, from plague and 
Asiatic cholera, we acquire immunity by vaccination with 
dead bacteria—“cultures.”” With a secretion (or excretion) 
of living bacteria we acquire immunity from diphtheria. In 
other words, we become actively immune by incorporating into 
our body “live virulent bacteria, less virulent bacteria, dead 
bacteria, bacterial secretions, or bacterial products from 
broken-down dead bacteria.” An anti-bacterial serum is a 
protective; an antitoxic serum is a curative. 

Much is known of the “how” of immunity, almost nothing 
of the “why.” But great advance in the future will come from 
specific artificial remedies—drugs, chemotherapy. The prob- 
lem is to find a drug that will kill the bug but not the patient 
—*“magic bullets charmed to fly straight to a specific objec- 
tive, turning aside from anything else in its path.” 

Quinine is specific death for malaria germs; ipecacuanha 
for the ameba which causes amebic dysentery. Possibly 
chaulmoogra oil is a specific cure for leprosy; asphenamin 
(“606”), for syphilis, relapsing fever, and yaws; atoxyl, for 
sleeping sickness. The list of specific cures is pitiably small 
yet. Bacteriology is new, immunology is newer. Only re- 
cently have the chemotherapists had real targets to shoot at. 
The problems which confront them to-day are vastly more 
important than the puny worlds Alexander exhausted in his 
conquests. 


200 


CHAPTER IV 


THE ENDOCRINE GLANDS AND THE CAUSES OF DEATH 


1. Endocrine Glands and Hormones. 2. The Thyroid Gland. 3. The Para- 
thyroid and Thymus Glands. 4. The Adrenal Glands. 5. The Emergency 
Functions of the Adrenals. 6. The Pituitary and Pineal Glands. 7. The 
Pancreas—and Other “Sweetbreads.” 8. Introducing the Gonads. 9. The 
Dual Role of the Gonads. 10. The Female Gonads. 11. The Male Gonads. 
12. Secondary Sexual Characters. 13. The More “Human” Sex. 14. Endocrine 
Facts and Fancies. 15. The Individual That Is Regulated. 16. “How Can a 
Man Be Born When He Is Old?” J17. One Good Defect Deserves Another. 
18. The Parts That Wear Out First. 19. The Best Life Insurance. 20. Our 
Total Mileage. 


I 

Waite life remains in the body, the duct glands furnish 
the necessary chemicals for heat and energy metabolism and 
for the preparation of materials for growth and repair. If 
they fail to supply fuel, the body dies; if they fail to furnish 
building material, the body stops growing. Let us assume 
that the duct glands do not fail. It then appears that the body 
which began as a fertilized ovum develops into a 9-pound 
infant in9 months. Why does it not develop into a 90-pound 
child in 90 months, or a 900-pound prodigy in 900 months? 
Even if it only kept up its first two years’ rate-growth, it would 
weigh 500 pounds in twenty-four years. It does not grow so 
big. Itstops. Sometimes too soon—it is dwarfed; sometimes 
not soon enough—it is gigantic, though rarely, if ever, sur- 
passing the nine feet three inches of Machnow, the Russian. 
But it stops. Why? 

Meanwhile the growing body keeps changing in size, shape, 
proportions. Certain parts or organs appear before others 
start to appear. For a while the brain grows faster than the 

201 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


motor mechanism; at other times the motor mechanism grows 
more rapidly. The teeth have their special periods for 
growth. The infant’s thigh bone at birth has 2,000,000 
bone-building cells. When that bone is a finished adult 
product it contains over 150,000,000 bone cells. Why stop 
at so few? How do the leg bones know when to stop growing 
longer, the skull bones to stop growing larger? Why does the 
body grow by fits and starts and finally seem to be complete? 
What regulates the growth of all these parts and of the body 
as a whole? 

Moore replaced a rat’s ovaries with the sex glands from 
a male; her body and behavior took on decided male charac- ' 
ters. By the same operation which converts the unruly bull 
into a docile ox and the stringy cock into a tender-fleshed 
capon, the Sistine Chapel in Rome up to 1878 maintained its 
male sopranos. Why does the boy’s voice begin to crack 
and his face, almost overnight as it were, begin to grow a 
beard where there was no sign of one? Is sex also, like growth 
and individuality, a whim of “heredity,” or are our sex, in- 
dividual traits, and physical growth under the control of 
definite regulators? Fifty years from now we shall begin to 
know the details, but enough is now known of the ductless 
glands and their secretions to open up not only a new chapter 
of life, but new accounts with life. They regulate sex, rate 
of growth of tissues and organs, and consequently physical 
traits. 

The secretions of the ductless glands are discharged direct 
into the blood, hence they are also called glands of internal 
secretion, or endocrines (endon, within; krino, I separate). 
There are commonly said to be seven endocrines proper: thy- 
roid, parathyroid, and thymus, in the neck; pituitary and 
pineal, in the center of the head; adrenals and spleen, in the 
abdomen. But it is not yet proved that the thymus, pineal, 
and spleen are true glands. The liver, pancreas, and sex 
glands also function as endocrines. 

Endocrine secretions are chemical in nature and are usu- 

202 


THE ENDOCRINE GLANDS AND THE CAUSES OF DEATH 


ally called hormones (exciters). They are also called auta- 
coid substances: from acos, a remedy—they act like drugs. 
They are drugs, some of them of astounding potency. In 
fact, no man-made drugs are so powerful as some we make 
in our own drug-store glands. 

Mere regulation is not, of course, confined to the secretions 
of glands. For example, the chief regulator of the respira- 
tory system is carbon dioxide, given off by every cell of our 
body; thus liberated, it functions as a hormone or “‘exciter.” 
But, as Abel puts it, the hormones actually known are definite 
and specifically acting indispensable chemical products which 
modify development and growth of other organs, especially 
during embryonic life, and the entire metabolism, including 
that of the nervous system, during adult life. Then, too, 
there is a collective operation of the endocrines, as yet not 
definitely known, but summarized by Barker as follows: 


More and more we are forced to realize that the general form 
and the external appearance of the human body depends to a 
large extent upon their functioning. Our stature, the kinds of 
faces we have, the length of our arms and legs, the shape of the 
pelvis, the color and consistency of our integument, the quantity 
and regional location of our fat, the amount and distribution of 
hair on our bodies, the tonicity of our muscles, the sound of the 
voice and the size of the larynx, the emotions to which our “ex- 
térieur” gives expression—all are to a certain extent conditioned 
by the productivity of our hormonopoietic glands. We are, in a 
sense, the beneficiaries and the victims of the chemical correlations 
of our endocrine organs. 


In short, as the discovery of enzymes and antibodies gave 
a new insight into the problem of the nature of living proc- 
esses, the discovery of the hormones opens up anew the whole 
conception of heredity. We can now'say that men are alike 
because they inherit the same kind of blood and similar sets 
of glands to secrete hormones for the blood to carry; but that 
men differ because they do not meet the same physical and 
chemical conditions during life and as a consequence do not 

203 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


develop the same catalyzers, the same immunity agents, or 
the same regulating agents. 

Or we can say, with Loeb, that the organism itself molds 
itself into an organic whole; in the case of the human ovum, 
into a human being, because the genus Homo and species 
sapiens inhere in the specific protein of the human ovum; but 
that the traits of individuality or “Mendelian characters” are 
determined by the enzymes regulating metabolism and the 
hormones in control of growth and so of personality. 


2 


The endocrine gland best understood is the thyroid (shield- 
like) astride our Adam’s apple. It varies individually and 
with age. It is relatively largest in fetal life. At birth its 
weight in proportion to the entire body is as 1 to 300, by the 
third week as 1 to 1,160, and in the adult as 1 to 1,800. 
It is generally larger in women than in men. Why this is so 
is not yet known. 

The thyroid usually consists of two equally developed lobes 
two inches long, an inch and a quarter broad. They vary 
greatly; one lobe may be much larger than the other, or may 
be quite absent. Generally the two lobes are connected 
by an isthmus; this also varies in position or may be absent. 
There may be accessory thyroids down the trachea as far 
as the heart. 

Only in higher fishes does the thyroid become a ductless 
gland, take on new functions, and start a new career. In 
man, a duct is sometimes found in the isthmus—vestige of 
a condition found in lowest fishes, echo of millions of years 
ago. It is prone to trouble. 

Frogs’ eggs develop into fish-like tadpoles. Tadpoles lose 
their tails and gills, develop true lungs, and become frogs. 
Remove the tadpole’s thyroid: it never becomes a frog; it 
remains a tadpole for life. Feed a tadpole with thyroid: it 
becomes frog in a hurry, the fish stage of its existence being 

204 


THE ENDOCRINE GLANDS AND THE CAUSES OF DEATH 


reduced from a year to two weeks; but the frog is only as big 
as a fly. Feeding thyroid to tadpoles evidently produces two 
results: it hastens metamorphosis but retards growth. 

Children with deficient thyroids, through removal, atrophy, 
or injury, become heavy-featured, gibbering, idiotic dwarfs 
known as cretins; they do not metamorphose into normal 
adults. Their skin is dry and hairless; their sex glands are 
under-developed; their pubic hair and puberty develop late 
or not at all; their temperature is subnormal; they are pot- 
bellied because their pelvis remains small, their limbs short 
and thick. The corresponding adult condition is known as 
myxedema: white, hairless, and thick, dry, rough skin; 
obesity; lowered temperature and metabolism; pulse slow 
and weak; mind dull. 

These appalling results in both children and adults have 
been corrected by feeding thyroid extract. The changes thus 
produced have been little short of miraculous. Cretins have 
increased in stature several inches in one year. The first 
myxedema patient to be treated died in 1920 after twenty- 
nine years of good health due to thyroid feeding. 

Enlargement of the thyroid from whatsoever cause is called 
goiter, or Derbyshire neck. But an over-developed or over- 
active thyroid produces a definite disease known as toxic or 
exopthalmic goiter, or Graves’ disease. This is characterized 
by increased metabolism and blood pressure, rapid pulse, 
lax and moist skin, nervousness, and protruding eyeballs— 
hence the name, “exopthalmic.” The remedy is still in the 
hands of the surgeon. The cause and significance of change 
in the thyroid in toxic goiter and the cause of endemic goiter 
are not yet understood. Nor is it understood why women are 
more prone to toxic goiter than men, the disproportion in 
some localities being as high as fifteen to one. 

It is believed that the activating principle of the thyroid 
hormone is thyroxin, isolated by Kendall in 1918. Thyroxin 
is a crystalline compound of three molecules of iodine fixed 

205 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


in a protein derivative: tri-iodo-tri-hydro-oxyindole propionic 
acid, or 65 per cent of iodine. 

Only the thyroid secretes thyroxin, and apparently it is the 
iodine in thyroxin that tells the story. Iodine is found in 
many seaweeds; is three times more abundant in codfish than 
in human beings; is found in traces in milk and in drinking 
water; and gets its name from its violet (iodes) color! 

Possibly no life exists without iodine. Certainly normal 
human life is impossible without one one-hundredth of a grain 
of thyroxin a day. Three and a half grains of thyroxin-are 
all that stands between intelligence and imbecility. But, 
there are, of course, dozens of causes of subnormal mentality 
other than hypothyroidism. 

No limit of function can yet be assigned to any one en- 
docrine, because they are parts of an organic whole and func- | 
tion as parts of living individuals. So with the thyroid: 
much is known, its whole story is far from known. But 
from what is known Hoskins characterizes it as a regulator 
of energy discharge to aid in adapting the animal to its en- 
vironment. To Carlson it is a specific necessity for the 
development of the reproductive mechanism in males and 
for the lunar cycle in adult females. Both views are founded 
in facts and are not in conflict. 


3 


Closely associated with the thyroid are two other endocrines - 
which develop in the epithelium of an embryonic branchial 
cleft or gill-arch. Of these the parathyroids are so closely 
associated in post-natal life in some animals that it is impos- 
sible to remove the thyroids without removing the parathy- 
roids also. They were only discovered in 1880. 

They are about as big as peas and are paired, generally two 
on each side and near the thyroids. They also vary in num- 
ber, size, and position; they may extend far down the trachea. 
Their function is not yet understood, nor is it yet known if 

206 


THE ENDOCRINE GLANDS AND THE CAUSES OF DEATH 


they are glands of internal secretion. It is known that death 
follows their removal, generally in from twelve to forty-eight 
hours. Sometimes recovery seems assured, but death has 
only been postponed—and not beyond fourteen days. Death 
is accompanied by tetany—acute muscular convulsions, and 
not to be confounded with tetanus, or “lockjaw.” In some 
cases the hair and nails fall off, the teeth become loose and 
shed, and cataract of the eye develops. Hence it is inferred 
that they have to do with calcium metabolism. It is claimed 
that tetany may be cured by parathyroid feeding, but Carl- 
son maintains that true tetany has not yet been cured by this 
method. Improvement may result from transplanting para- 
thyroid from other animals, but when all the parathyroids 
are removed tetany and death follow. Parathyroid function 
is a condition of life. 

What is tetany? 

Infantile tetany is called “fits”; it is thought to be due to 
defective parathyroids. The calcium metabolism is upset: 
bad bone growth, the teeth do not calcify. The phosphate 
metabolism also seems to be upset: not enough phosphates are 
excreted. Also a tendency to acidosis in the blood, probably 
due to defective carbohydrate metabolism. A substance called 
methylguanidin appears in the urine and blood; it is bad 
poison. Guanidin is also found in decomposing horseflesh, 
in culture of the anthrax bacillus, etc. 

Guanidin increases neuromuscular excitability: fits, 
cramps, tetany spasms. A strychnine salt also does it. The 
motor responses to stimuli are no longer co-ordinated, but 
become convulsive—“tetanized.” That is why the lockjaw 
germ is called the bacillus of tetanus. With it at work releas- 
ing its specific toxin, muscles of jaws and other skeletal 
muscles “lock.” Spasms follow the slightest stimulus. Possi- 
bly methylguanidin breaks down the resistance of the synap- 
ses of the neuromotor system—as strychnine and tetanus toxin 
are supposed to. 

We seem to be far from the parathyroids. It is not known 

207 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


if they secrete a hormone or if they are glands, but whatever 
they are they are vital structures, and certain death—and 
death with certain accompaniments—follows their removal. 
But Collip has recently reported that he has prepared an 
extract from animal parathyroids, which he calls parathyrin. 
With this he claims to control tetany in dogs, and to have 
treated a child in desperate condition with successful results. 

No one knows yet what constitutes a normal human para- 
thyroid. There is even more doubt as to what is a normal 
thymus, or whether it is a gland, or what happens when it is 
removed. It lies just under the upper end of the breast bone, 
is well developed in the fetus, better developed at the age of 
two, largest at puberty. It then begins to lose its character 
and becomes connective tissue, lymphatic tissue, and fat. But 
this change is delayed by castration. Hence it is assumed 
to hold back the development of the sex glands until puberty. 
Post-mortem examination of 400 idiots showed no thymus in 
75 per cent. Its removal in young animals retards growth 
but hastens sexual development; the sex glands remain weak, 
the body flabby and dwarfed. 

Riddle claims that the thymus lost its value for man and 
mammals when their ancestors began to incubate their eggs 
within their body and ceased laying them, as do birds and 
reptiles, with albumen and shells. That was the original 
function of the thymus. Pigeons whose thymus has been re- 
moved lay eggs without shells; but if fed thymus, will lay 
normal eggs with shells. If your hens’ eggs have ,too little 
albumen or a soft shell, feed your chickens dried thymus of 
an ox. And thank the thymus because its secretions made it 
possible for our reptilian ancestor to invent an egg that could 
evolve into a human ovum. 


4, 


The adrenals, or suprarenals, get their name from their 
position just above the kidneys. Normally they are of the 
208 


THE ENDOCRINE GLANDS AND THE CAUSES OF DEATH 


size and shape of a large bean. But they vary: one—or, in 
rare cases, both—may be absent; there may be accessory 
adrenals varying in size from a pin head to a large pea. Re- 
moval of one adrenal produces no known result. Removal 
of both is always fatal, often within a few hours. When 
death does not follow their removal it is because accessory 
adrenals are present and can function. 

The adrenal in some fishes is two separate organs. In the 
human embryo it begins as two; these unite to form one body 
with two distinct parts: an outside cortex, or bark, and a 
medulla, or core, completely inclosed by the cortex. The 
cortex arises from the middle germ-layer and is derived from 
the Wolfhan body, which also assists in the development of 
the urogenital system. The medulla is part of the outer germ- 
layer and is derived from the same embryonic tissue as is the 
autonomic nervous system; it is largely composed of nerve- 
like tissue. Its importance is possibly second only to that of 
the brain. No other organ in the body is so well supplied 
with blood. 

Removal of the cortex is always followed by profound 
prostration, loss of appetite, apathy, labored respiration, 
weak and irregular heart, paralysis, and, within a few hours 
or days, death. Its secretion has not yet been isolated; it is 
not certain whether it is a secreting or a detoxicating organ. 
It is a vital organ. It appears to stimulate sex-gland growth 
and bring on sexual maturity. Its over-activity, as, for ex- 
ample, when involved in a tumor, makes for precocious sexual 
development. When it is infected, as it sometimes is in tuber- 
culosis, a disease results called “‘Addison’s,” from its dis- 
coverer in 1855. This is the only disease definitely known 
to be caused by insufficient adrenal cortex. It is as yet in- 
curable and ends in death. Nor has the attempt to overcome 
cortical deficiency, due to disease or removal, yet met with 
success. Addison’s disease is accompanied by great muscular 
weakness, nervous depression, digestive irritability, and such 

209 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


increase in pigmentation of the skin that a white skin looks 
like bronze. 

The medulla of the adrenals is possibly more important 
than the cortex. As it cannot be removed without injury to 
the cortex, it is not yet certain that it is a vital organ as the 
cortex is known to be. Adrenin, the hormone of the medulla, 
was the first endocrine secretion to be isolated. Its deriva- 
tive was discovered by Abel in 1897 and named “epine- 
phrin”; its pure form was isolated in 1901 by both Takamine 
and Aldrich. By 1908 it was so well understood that it was 
artifically produced from a coal-tar derivative. It is now a 
drug on the market and sold as epinephrin or adrenalin. 
Abel describes it as a di-hydroxymethyl-aminoethylol benzine 
or an “aromatic amino alcohol.” Here is its formula: 

CeHs(OH)2COCH2Cl + NH2CHs -> CsHs(OH)2.COCHs. 
NHCHs:.HC1. 

And here is a curious fact. This remarkable drug is found 
in man in a gland of internal secretion. The principle of this 
drug is the constituent of a gland of external secretion in the 
skin of a toad. That fact was unknown to the New England | 
colonists, but Toad Ointment was known. Abel quotes the 
recipe: 


Good-sized live toads, 4 in number; put into boiling water and 
cook very soft; then take them out and boil the water down to 
half pint, and add fresh churned, unsalted butter, 1 pound, and 
simmer together; at the last add tincture of arnica 2 ounces. 


What was Toad Ointment good for? Sprains and rheuma- 
tism! The Chinese still treat or “cure” dropsy with toad- 
skin preparations, as did Europe up to 1775, when it was 
supplanted by digitalis. But if the colonists had persevered 
they might have isolated from their toads, as did Abel, a 
crystal composed of CisH2sO4 and called bufagin (bufo, 
toad) with the property of a powerful heart stimulant and 
thereby good for dropsy. But they could not have derived 
epinephrin from their toads because they did not have the 

210 


THE ENDOCRINE GLANDS AND THE CAUSES OF DEATH 


right kind of toads. Epinephrin is found in the skin glands 
of external secretion of an Upper Amazon toad. The secre- 
tion of these skin glands smeared on arrows makes a fine 
poison for the natives, so powerful that in a few moments it 
will kill a deer or a jaguar. The skin of that Amazon toad 
contains both epinephrin and bufagin, both powerful drugs, 
acting fatally on the heart and blood vessels. Imagine what 
happens to the animal that eats that toad! 

Which brings us back to adrenin, a powerful drug, a power- 
ful cardio-vascular stimulant. Normally our blood contains 
about eight milligrams of it, which means that the proportion 
of adrenin to arterial blood is one part to a billion. Admin- 
istered as one part in twenty million, it acts on the uterus and 
is a useful drug in hemorrhages following delivery. It in- 
fluences some tissues when diluted to one part in 100,000,- 
000. It depresses the intestinal canal when diluted to one 
part in 330,000,000! What such dilution means has been 
worked out in terms of street sprinklers each of 625 gallons 
capacity. A procession of such sprinklers twenty miles long 
and 200 to the mile would hold just enough water to dilute 
one ounce of adrenin down to one dose. Large doses are 
fatal. 

Adrenin is a drug, one of the most potent our body con- 
cocts. Yet adrenal feeding leads to no known or proved re- 
sults. The administration of the drug adrenalin does lead 
to profound results. Our body blood contains this drug. 
Whether it is made by or excreted by the adrenals is still an 
open question, but that adrenin has specific action on the 
vascular system, the nervous system, the blood, the alimentary 
canal, and on sugar mobilization, there is no doubt. Nor 
is there any doubt that when administered as a drug it in- 
creases the action of local anesthetics by constricting the 
blood vessels, thus preventing local loss of the anesthetic. 
And as this reduces the amount of anesthetic required, it 
also reduces the amount of toxin danger from the anesthetic. 
It checks hemorrhages. It allays the spasms of acute bron: 

211 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


chial asthma. It also stimulates weak hearts and fortifies the 
hearts of the old and infirm against the shock of operation. 

In short, adrenalin exerts an influence upon all smooth 
muscle enervated by fibers of the autonomic nervous system. 
That makes its responsibility enormous, its influence on hu- 
man destiny second to none. 

What, then, is the nature of this tiny but potent capsule 
tucked away in the depths of the abdominal cavity, nestling 
above the great excretory organs of the blood? Recall the 
potency of a toad’s bufagin to control the heart, the potency 
of a toad’s epinephrin to kill a strong animal. Try to picture 
a molecule of human adrenin from the above formula. 
Realize the close association of the fundamental vital proc- 
esses with the autonomic system. Is the human adrenal a 
“brain” which takes charge of us when we are confronted 
by emergencies which mean life or death? It may be thought 
of in that way. 

3 


In crises our body goes on a “‘war footing’”’—as our country 
did a few years ago. Piano manufacturers began to make 
airplanes. Artists turned from painting corset advertise- 
ments to camouflaging battleships. Our sugar rations were 
cut that the fighters might have enough. The entire plant of 
the nation turned from peaceful pursuits to speed up the 
fuel for the engines of war. Life had become a dog-fight. 

Ever try to take a bone from a dog? Or observe a cat 
when a dog suddenly appears? Or a mother when some one 
injures her child? How do you feel when you are “horror- 
stricken,” “sick with disgust,” “paralyzed with fear,” “crazy 
with pain,” or so mad you “choke?” Tongue cleaving to 
the roof of the mouth, “cold-sweat,” pupils of the eyes dilated, 
pounding heart, hurried breathing, hair on end, muscles of 
face and especially of the lips trembling and twitching: such 
are among the obvious symptoms of pain, of horror, of fear, 
etc. 

212 


THE ENDOCRINE GLANDS AND THE CAUSES OF DEATH 


We recognize many emotional states and are subject to them 
in varying intensity: pain, anger, fear, rage, horror, sorrow, 
anxiety, grief, terror, disgust. An insulting word may liter- 
ally alter our entire nature. We feel these states; we observe 
the results in others. What is not so obvious is that the body 
itself often undergoes profound physiological change. 

The mechanism by which our natures can be suddenly 
altered is to be found in the middle or sympathetic division 
of the autonomic nervous system and—according to the 
theory—the secretion of the medulla of the adrenal gland. 
The way these two work together and the striking, sudden, 
and far-reaching consequences of their actions, form the basis 
for Cannon’s claim in 1914 that adrenin is nature’s reply to 
the crises, the unexpected do-or-die emergencies of living 
animals, Emotional behavior gets its kick from adrenin. 
With adrenin cowards may fight for their lives, brave men 
may surpass themselves, and all of us can run as we never 
ran before; or shed tears of sorrow over the loss of friends. 

There are three divisions of the autonomic nervous system. 
The upper, or cranial, is concerned with the joys and sorrows 
of life. Its nerves conserve the body, building up reserves 
and fortifying the body for times of crises. By narrowing 
the pupils they shield the eye from too much light. By slow- 
ing the heartbeat they give the heart muscles longer periods 
for rest. By causing the mouth to water they set the juice 
flowing and supply muscular tone for the alimentary canal’s 
ceaseless movements. The lower, or sacral, division covers 
the emptying mechanisms of large intestine and urogenital 
system; relief and comfort acts. 

Between cranial and sacral is the sympathetic division— 
enormously important. It dilates the pupils of the eyes, hur- 
ries up heartbeat, stands hairs on end by causing each smooth 
hair-muscle to contract, opens sweat glands (pouring out 
excess heat), stops movements in stomach and intestine, re- 
leases sugar (the best fighting fuel) from the liver; and re- 
leases adrenin. The medulla of the adrenal, alone of all the 

213 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


endocrine glands, is connected with the autonomic nervous 
system. 

Here is the point. Adrenin itself, injected into the blood, 
will dilate pupils, stand hairs on end, constrict blood vessels, 
stop the vegetative activities in alimentary canal, and release 
sugar from the liver. Remove the liver from the body, keep 
it alive artificially: adrenin will cause it to release sugar. 

The real business of the adrenal glands, according to Can- 
non’s theory, is emergency function. When we must fight or 
run for our lives, our body has no time to fool with a mouth 
watering for its appetite or several yards of alimentary canal 
activity. The test tubes for chemical action, and the fires to 
keep these actions going, must be neglected for the moment. 
Their energy must be made available for action in the big 
striped muscles of the motor fighting-or-fleeing mechanism. 

When a joy is so strong or a sorrow or a disgust so deep 
that it breaks over the threshold of the cranial division and 
enters the sympathetic, we lose our appetite: no saliva, no 
gastric or pancreatic juice, no movement in the intestine. 
Even an empty stomach stops growling and holds its peace 
when war is on. 

And war is on when any of life’s instinctive acts with 
emotional trimmings are thwarted. Anger. The body is 
prepared to fight. All its life long life has had to know how 
to kill, how to avoid death. It has had to learn to count on 
its muscles and its nerves when the test comes. Adrenin is 
supposed to be the answer. 

According to Cannon’s theory, adrenin bucks us up. It 
speeds up the heartbeat. Draws blood from spleen, kidneys, 
intestines, and other inhibited organs of the abdomen—thus 
also reducing their size. Drives blood to the skeletal muscles, 
brain, and lungs. Relaxes the smooth muscles of the tiny 
air sacs in the lungs, thus facilitating the exchange of carbon 
dioxide waste for the greater oxygen required in great effort. 
Orders the liver to give the blood more sugar, the optimum 
source of muscle energy. Drives fatigue from the muscles. 

214 


THE ENDOCRINE GLANDS AND THE CAUSES OF DEATH 


Contracts the blood vessels of the skin and makes the blood 
coagulate more quickly, so lessening our liability of bleeding 
to death in case of wound. Adrenin wins battles and makes 
men brave; lack of it may make them cowards. 

It has been urged against Cannon’s hypothesis that it is not 
yet conclusively proved. What is proved is that without 
adrenals—or accessory adrenals—no man lives; with adrenin 
far-reaching changes occur which, combined, transform the 
vegetation body into a fighting machine. Nor is there any 
doubt as to what our emotions do to us. The réle that Cannon 
ascribes to the adrenals is reasonable and plausible; it has 
proved to be a working hypothesis in biology. 


6 


The pituitary gland is about as big as the tip of the little 
finger, hangs from the base of the brain by a hollow stem 
(hence also called the hypophysis cerebri), and is housed in 
a pocket of the sphenoid bone called the Turk’s saddle. It 
is as near the center of the head as it can get; hence operation 
on the pituitary is enormously difficult. But if the patient 
—dog or man—does not die from brain injury, removal of 
the pituitary itself is not fatal. It is not a vital organ, but a 
normal pituitary is essential to normal life. 

The gland has two lobes, each of different embryonic ori- 
gin, and probably different in function. The anterior lobe 
is much the larger and is an ectoderm structure, arising as 
a fold of the lining of the mouth. Its structure is that of a 
gland and it has a rich blood supply. It does not remain © 
constant in size. It seems to be associated with rate of growth 
and sexual development. Its removal is followed by many 
symptoms, but which are due to its removal, which to injuries 
to the brain, is uncertain. A substance called tethelin pre- 
pared from this lobe has been used experimentally and other- 
wise, but no chemical individual has yet been isolated. It is 

215 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


claimed, but not proved, that tethelin hurries sexual maturity 
in the young and promotes sex activity in adults. 

The posterior lobe arises from the floor of the third ven- 
tricle of the brain and is largely nerve tissue. For a dozen 
years its active principle was known to science and used as 
an extract called pituitrin by physicians and _ surgeons, 
especially as a rival to ergot in obstetrics. Used in overdoses 
or at the wrong stage of childbirth, it caused several deaths, 
because it can so act on the uterus as to tear it open. 

Abel is convinced that the posterior lobe has only one 
hormone and not four, as had been claimed by German 
chemists. From it he has only recently isolated a pure tar- 
trate which he characterizes as “extraordinarily potent” and 
endowed with several different and distinct properties. It is 
a thousand times more powerful than any hitherto known 
stimulant for non-skeletal muscle tissue—a thousand times 
more powerful than the “extract” pituitrin which, wrongly 
used, could tear a uterus asunder! 

Recall the twenty-mile procession of street sprinklers re- 
quired to reduce an ounce of epinephrin to a test dose: to 
reduce an equal amount of Abel’s pituitary hormone would 
require not twenty miles of sprinklers, but 5,000 miles! The 
actual test was made on a virgin guinea-pig’s uterus; it 
contracted when suspended in a solution of one part hormone 
to 18,750,000,000 parts water. Such facts, as Hoskins says, 
make endocrinology kin to astronomy. 

This hormone acts on the entire cardio-vascular apparatus. 
By restricting the small blood vessels it causes prolonged rise 
of blood pressure. It acts upon the respiration, causing a 
rhythmic increase of breathing up to a certain degree of 
rapidity, then a gradual decrease again to a temporary stop- 
page of breathing. 

When injected daily it has proved a remarkable remedy in 
the disease known as diabetes insipidus, not to be confounded 
with sugar or mellitus diabetes. In the latter the kidneys 
eliminate sugar that belongs to the blood and is needed by 

216 


THE ENDOCRINE GLANDS AND THE CAUSES OF DEATH 


the body. In insipidus, it is claimed the kidneys leave so 
much sugar in the blood that the body gets fat. But the 
danger in diabetes insipidus is the excessive and uncontroll- 
able elimination of water by the kidneys and a consequent 
incessant thirst. 

“Joe,” the fat boy of Pickwick Papers, had a fat chest, 
flabby muscles, and sexual infantilism. To-day “Joe” would 
be diagnosed as dystrophia adiposogenitalis. The anterior 
lobe of his pituitary was probably diseased and consequently 
‘under-functioned. 

Too much activity in the anterior lobe in early life is 
believed but not proved to lead to gigantism, in later life to 
acromegaly. There seems to be no doubt that the pituitary 
gland is closely related to growth, especially in connective 
tissue, cartilage and: bone, and sex-gland activity. But where 
abnormal growth occurs it is rarely possible to say whether 
it results from specific activity—too much or too little—in 
the gland, or from the pressure of a tumor on or in the gland 
or on the floor of the third ventricle of the brain. Other 
glands than the pituitary may be involved when the pituitary 
itself is abnormal. Whether the pituitary was the primary or 
the secondary cause of the upset in response to growth stimuli 
is not yet known. 

Abnormal adult growth changes known as acromegaly are 
characteristic and unmistakable: enlarged bones of the head, 
hands, and feet, general lassitude, pains in the muscles, lack 
of interest, and depressed sex activity often leading to im- 
potence or amenorrhea. 

The famous Irish giant Magrath had a pituitary as big as 
a hen’s egg. His hands resembled shoulders of mutton, his 
lower jaw was a massive appendage to a huge face. A dis- 
eased pituitary in a normal adult caused the face to grow 
massive and ugly, with bulging masses about the eyes, the 
nose huge, the lips thick; the chest huge and barrel-shaped; 
the hands and feet of enormous size. A dwarf of twenty 
years with an under-developed pituitary had the bones of a 

217 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


child a few weeks old. Another dwarf of mature years and 
so tiny as to have been “‘served” in a pie at the Duke of Buck- 
ingham’s table in honor of the Queen of Charles I, began a 
second period of growth. Some alteration in the pituitary, 
possibly. . 

That the pituitary is concerned in sex growth is inferred 
from the fact that it becomes enlarged following castration; 
as it also does during pregnancy when the ovaries temporarily 
change their function. It is suggestive also that at that time 
the hands sometimes enlarge and the face changes. 

Perhaps no structure, in proportion to its size, is more inter- 
esting or of less importance than our pineal gland. Of the 
size of a grain of wheat,-it lies high up in the base of the 
brain behind and above the pituitary. It reaches full de- 
velopment at the seventh year, then begins to atrophy, and 
in adults has become connective tissue and “brain sand”: 
minute grains of phosphate and carbonate of lime. This 
‘“‘sand’’ is often found elsewhere in the brain, even in fetal 
life. 

Descartes held that the pineal is the seat of the soul. He 
was long on philosophy, but short on comparative anatomy. 
Yet possibly he was nearer the truth than he realized. 
Millions of years ago the pineal was a third eye and looked 
straight up to heaven. Extinct reptiles have a hole in the 
skull for this pineal eye. The sphenodon, an almost extinct 
New Zealand reptile, is the only living animal with a pineal 
organ that resembles a true eye. Most lizards have a pineal 
organ, and, above, a hole in the roof of the skull. The hole 
is covered by a scale; the organ, therefore, cannot function as 
a true eye, it may serve as an organ for sensing lights and 
shadows. Except the lowest fishes, all vertebrates have a 
relic of this “eye.” In Man the “relic” has a vestige of the 
optic nerve. 

No pineal hormone has yet been discovered, nor is it yet 
certain that it is a gland. Nothing certain is known of its 
function, nor is it certain that it has any importance beyond 

218 


THE ENDOCRINE GLANDS AND THE CAUSES OF DEATH 


pre-adolescence, if it has any then. From the fact that tumors 
of the pineal are often associated with precocious mental and 
sexual development, it is inferred that its business is to pro- 
mote early physical growth and retard sexual development. 
But this is only inference—the tumor may also have involved 
the mid-brain. 


7 


To Lavoisier’s dictum: “‘Life is a chemical function,” we 
might add, “‘and ceases to function without sugar.” At any 
rate, we eat more sugar than we should, because our body 
finds sugar where we little suspect it. Sugar is the finest 
fuel our blood can find to keep life on the move. When any- 
thing happens to our sugar refinery, sugar storage, or sugar 
delivery, we suffer from one of several more or less fatal 
diseases. 

The regulator of sugar metabolism is a group of secreting 
organs known as the islands of Langerhans, in the “sweet- 
breads” or pancreas, and which act as a gland of internal 
secretion. Its hormone, insulin, is delivered direct to the 
blood. Pancreatic juice, an important digestive fluid, is 
delivered by the duct of Wirsung to the alimentary canal. 

Diabetes (from the Greek “to go through”) follows when 
the islands of Langerhans stop functioning. The isolation of 
insulin, chiefly due to Banting and McLeod, ends a search of 
many long years and closes one of the most interesting chap- 
ters in the new science of endocrines. There is a remedy for 
diabetes mellitus, but no cure. Life can be prolonged “in- 
definitely”; but insulin feeding alone will not prevail without 
control of diet. 

It is significant that of the more than a million sufferers 
from diabetes in this country 90 per cent are overweight; 
and that of those over fifty years of age there are twenty fat 
for every thin diabetic sufferer. From which we infer that 
- the human pancreas as regulator of sugar metabolism tends 
219 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


to break down when we take on more fat than we require. We 
take on fat when we eat more sugars and fats than we use up. 

The pancreas is a very vital organ. Its removal, or the 
removal of seven-eighths of it, is followed by a condition 
like that of diabetes: increased urine, abnormal thirst and 
hunger, death. Its hormone, delivered to the blood, regulates 
the output of glycogen from the liver, and is necessary for 
the building of glycogen and the oxidation of sugar by the 
body tissues. This is the route: 

The portal blood carries glucose to the liver. The liver 
converts glucose into glycogen (animal starch). The liver 
itself is not an endocrine gland, although it does deliver 
sugar to the blood direct. It stores up no hormones, but it 
reeks with extracts. It stores vitamins; it destroys fat; it 
stores glycogen. It is a vital organ. Nothing takes its place 
or can do its refining. All its processes depend upon its own 
liver cells. How it converts sugar into animal starch for 
storage purposes and how it reconverts it into sugar when 
the secretion from the islands of Langerhans tells it to do 
so, are not known. It does. If the islands stop sending 
messages, the liver gives up all its sugar to the blood, but the 
body cells cannot store or burn it and so it is filtered by the 
kidneys from the blood and passed on to the bladder. 

The spleen has no duct; it has no secretions. It is not a 
gland. Just what it is no one knows. Its functions are not 
specific, nor does its removal seem to impair health, growth, 
or longevity. In the fetus it is probably an incubator for 
red blood-cells; after birth it seems to be an incinerator of 
red blood-cells. They work so hard carrying oxygen they 
wear themselves out in from ten to fifteen days. Perhaps 10 
per cent of all red blood-cells are destroyed each day. It is 
possible that an “enlarged” spleen destroys red cells faster 
than it should; it may therefore be responsible for chronic 
anemia. It does produce a chemical catalyzer; its enzymes 
convert nucleins into uric acid. 

The secretions of the stomach and small intestine—gastrin 

220 


THE ENDOCRINE GLANDS AND THE CAUSES OF DEATH 


and secretin—are drugs to be used on the spot. They are 
dangerous drugs if used elsewhere in or on the body. Stomach 
and intestine may produce hormones. May. If they do, they 
presumably regulate the pancreas, gastric glands, etc. 

Neither lymph nor lymph “gland” has any endocrine func- 
tion. Nor has the blood. A quart of my blood may tide you 
over until you can make enough to supply your loss. But 
my blood is my blood; it is in dynamic equilibrium, con- 
stantly changing to meet the specific requirements of the 
particular families of cells on its route in my body. 

Kidneys, if veal or sheep, are good to eat. They are good 
asfood. But “extract of kidney” is as good to repair a faulty 
kidney, or to treat uremia or nephritis, as powdered glass is 
to restore a watch crystal. The kidney is not a gland, it 
secretes nothing. It is a filter or excretory organ. 

Other “extracts” are doped out to meet the demand. Brains 
for dementia precox, tetanus, epilepsy, etc. Such treatment, 
says Carlson, is “less rational than the principles and prac- 
tices of Mrs. Eddy. Perhaps we could make for greater 
progress if the manufacturers [of dried brains| could be 
induced to use the brains of horses instead of asses and sheep 
for their raw material, and the finished product was taken by 
the doctor instead of being given to the patient.” 

Dried lungs, tonsils, retina, iris, nasal mucous membrane, 
and such can be had in the drug stores; “cures” for tuber- 
culosis, tonsilitis, etc. Rubbish. The few hormones that are 
really known are so powerful, so useful, so wonderful, that 
they have encouraged imitators. The result is a new crowd 
of quacks, ready to “feed” anybody anything that sounds like 
something and is therefore presumably a remedy. 


8 


Gonads is Greek for seeds. As the organs or glands of 
reproduction of both sexes produce seeds, it is a convenient 
and polite word for testes and ovaries. But the newspapers in 

221 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


referring to gonad operations, rejuvenescence, etc., always 
speak of “glands.” Only the context makes it certain that 
the “glands” referred to are not the parotid or thyroid or 
some other equally “respectable” gland. 

This reluctance—which Robinson characterizes as “‘shame- 
faced, prudish, and squeamish’’—to face the facts necessary 
to solve some of the simple but vital problems of everyday 
life is almost a chronic psychosis, with signs now and then of 
a tendency to sanity. 

Psychology has diagnosed the “impurity complex” and 
shown us what is back of the blatant prude who advertises 
his or her “purity.” It has also shown that the purity of the 
ignorant, when purchased at the price of a stifled natural 
curiosity, is not a safe and sane “purity.” The study of 
biology has begun to break down this impurity complex and 
the unholy, unnatural doctrine begun by early Christian 
monks that the sex impulse is man’s sign of degradation and 
the source of his most devilish energy. Nature knows better. 

Sex is a primary biologic function of all life above the 
lowest. Its characters and qualities have an ancient lineage. 
Its impulse is as real as is the force which makes the tides to 
ebb and flow. It has profoundly influenced structure and 
behavior. It is a fundamental element of all higher life; its 
external characters a neat advertising dodge of Nature by 
which she sells her wares and thereby insures her family. 

To sex we owe more than poetry; we owe the song of birds, 
all vocal music and the voice itself, the plumage that comes 
to supreme glory in the bird of paradise, the mane of the 
lion, the tresses of women, the blush of the maiden, the beard 
of men, and all higher forms of life in plant and animal 
world. It is woven into every fabric of human life and lays 
its finger on every custom. To the debit side of the sex ac- 
count we must charge many silly stupidities and some of the 
foulest injustices which go to make the thing we call human 
culture the amazing and variegated mosaic that it is. 

We are more enlightened than we were, but we have not 

222 


THE ENDOCRINE GLANDS AND THE CAUSES OF DEATH 


yet reached the stage where the mere mention of sex will not 
provoke some one to respond with a reproach or an insult. 
Whole blocks on Main Street assume that “sex knowledge”’ 
is of questionable propriety, or, at best, to be kept dark in 
“doctor-books”; or regard it as the banal possession of the 
frankly shameless. As a result, most pseudo-scientific “sex” 
literature slops over into the emotions and lets facts alone, or 
presents facts under disguises. Much of it has no biologic 
background or anything of the laws of life which govern 
man no less than every living thing. It is fear (sometimes 
called “reverence’’) that makes us “let sex alone.” It is 
mock modesty and foolish shame, masquerading under the 
name “decency,” that compels museums to clothe marble 
Fauns and plaster Joves and bronze Cupids with plaster-of- 
Paris fig leaves, often awry or nicked at the corner. 

Back of much of this confusion and nonsense is the para- 
dox which culminated in Puritanism: Marriage is a divine 
institution and the god of Love is a saint, but sex is shameful 
and Cupid is a carnal beast. 

Man is “high,” “animals” are “low’—without minds and 
of course can have no “souls.” We have. Ours is a 
“divine” parentage, our bodies “sacred.” Hence art, from 
Phidian sculpture to sophomoric poem, tends to the greater 
glory of Man: men and women more like gods and god- 
desses; gods and goddesses glorified men and women. 

And so it came about that the commonest thing in nature 
next to keeping alive became invested with the sanctity of 
heaven. Love begins with a capital “L” because it is sacred. 
So it is. Without it the world of man stops. There would 
be no more fishes in the sea if the males did not like the 
females. Love is fine. Put it on a pedestal, magnify it, 
glorify it, deify it. But why leave Cupid on the pedestal? 
To worship him blindly is on a par with any other fetishism, 
and quite as intelligent. Take him down and dust him off, 
repair his broken ears, mend his battered nose, refeather his 

225 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


arrows and restring his bow. Why not have a look at him? 
What is he made of? 


9 


Certain glands are essential to life. Their removal is fol- 
lowed by death. Not so the gonads proper. They may be 
removed, in fact are constantly being removed—especially 
those of women—in the operating rooms. What happens? 
The patient lives. The gonads are not necessary for indi- 
vidual life, only for that of the race or species. 

Physical differences between men and women are sexual. 
There are primary and secondary differences. The second- 
ary characters begin to assume definite form in both sexes 
at the beginning of puberty. These characters are by- 
products of the male and female gonads. 

The gonads are like true duct glands in that they discharge 
their secretion through ducts, but this secretion, unlike that 
of other duct glands, is not discharged into and consumed 
by the parent body. The gonads have an additional func- 
tion: they secrete a hormone which regulates the appearance 
and growth of the secondary characters and supplies the 
impulse back of sex behavior. In this they are like true 
endocrines, which deliver their regulating secretions direct 
to the blood stream. Thus the gonads are also glands of 
internal secretion. 

For ages it has been known that boys or girls deprived of 
their gonads before puberty develop into “womanly” men or 
“manly”? women and throughout life retain an infantile type 
of body. Eunuchs (“guardians of the couch,” created for 
religious and social ends), develop neither the voice nor the 
beard of men; in women similarly altered the mammary 
glands remain undeveloped, their bodies do not become so 
feminine. 

Experiments on chickens show that when the ovaries are 
completely removed from a young hen, she begins to take 

224, 


THE ENDOCRINE GLANDS AND THE CAUSES OF DEATH 


on the secondary sexual characters of the male: she develops 
comb, wattles, and spurs; her plumage becomes more bril- 
liant; she grows larger; she takes on the typical behavior of 
the rooster. This can only mean that the ovary itself, by its 
own internal secretion taken up into the blood stream, has 
power to modify the body in the direction of the female sex. 
It has been inferred that secondary male characters were 
potentially present in the hen, but were inhibited by the 
ovaries. 

Moore implanted a piece of ovary in a young male guinea- 
pig. His body was modified; his teats came to resemble those 
of a pregnant female. His behavior showed no sign of 
acquired feminine instincts. Another investigator reports 
“timid, shy, and mothering-the-young” behavior of a guinea- 
pig thus altered. But all investigators agree that the male 
gonad transplanted into an altered young female leads to 
change in both body and behavior. She becomes aggressive, 
quarrelsome, and behaves like a typical male toward other 
males and toward females in general. Her physical modifi- 
cation is equally profound. | 

Cattle breeders have long known that the female of 
bisexual twins is generally sterile and tends toward the male 
in physical characters. Such sterile females are called free- 
martins. Lillie investigated. The twins, it seems, develop 
independently in the two horns of the cow’s uterus, but join 
below in the outer fetal envelope. Through this they 
exchange blood. The precocious hormone of the fetal male 
sterilizes the fetal female ovary! It seems so extraordinary 
as to be almost incredible. 

But there is no doubt about sterile freemartins, nor about 
the fact of their intercommunicating arterial blood stream 
in fetal development. Lillie’s conclusions mean that the 
male fetus secretes a specific gonad hormone before its 
gonads are really formed; this male hormone sterilizes the 
female gonad. 

The fact that both pancreas and thyroid hormones are 

225 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


known to be secreted in intrauterine life lends weight to the 
inference that the sex hormones themselves are produced by 
the primitive germ cells. That there is no exchange of 
gonad hormones between the human fetus and its mother 
seems evident from the fact that the developing male fetus 
does not influence the sex life of the mother. 

In other words, while the nature of the sex impulse is the 
same in the two sexes, the sex hormones themselves are not 
the same. But they are not antagonistic. “Maleness” can 
be produced in females; “‘femaleness” in males. The male 
hormone in a young spayed female modifies both her 
behavior and her body. The female hormone in a castrated 
young male body modifies only the body. 

The male fetus does not modify its mother: she is still in 
possession of her own gonads. The male fetus modifies the 
behavior and sterilizes the gonads of its twin female fetus. 
Human twins, if “identical,” are always of the same sex; 
if not identical there is no exchange of blood, for each has 
its own fetal membranes. 


LO 


The adult female gonads in mammals contain ova in 
varying stages of ripening and interstitial stroma or cells. 
Both seem to have an identical origin and both pass through 
similar changes in development. 

The ova or germ-cells develop in Graafian follicles. When 
ripe they burst through the wall of the ovary. The ovum 
escapes. The ruptured follicle reassembles and enlarges for 
about a week, filling the rent in the ovarian wall. Then it 
breaks up and is absorbed before the next follicle matures. 
But if the ovum is fertilized, the follicle continues to develop 
for three months and then persists until the end of pregnancy. 
The ruptured and changing follicle is called the corpus 
luteum (yellow body) because of its color after the escape 
of the ovum. Corpora lutea are supposed to produce a 

226 





THE ENDOCRINE GLANDS AND THE CAUSES OF DEATH 


hormone. The ovary does produce hormones, how or where 
is not well understood; nor, in fact, has the ovary itself parted 
with half of its mysteries. 

Removal of the ovary or its absence or atrophy in the 
young is followed by an arrest of secondary sexual char- 
acters. The primary sexual characters, including the breasts, 
remain in an infantile condition. The lunar cycle does not 
appear. The body tends toward fat. Removal in the adult 
leads to atrophy of the primary sexual characters, the sup- 
pression of all sex functions, and of most sex behavior. 

The ovary can be transplanted from one part of the body 
to another; it long continues to function as an endocrine 
gland, no femininity is lost, nor does the lunar cycle cease. 
When transplanted from one body to another it may form 
blood connections, but it eventually degenerates. But as long 
as a piece of it remains alive in its new hostess her sex life, 
including lunar cycle, continues “normal.” 

For transplantation purposes a bit is as good as the entire 
ovary. Where, then, does its hormone come from? It pro- 
duces one: Carlson thinks probably several. None has yet 
been isolated or can be detected in the human blood. But 
Allen and Doisy claim to have isolated a mammalian ovary 
hormone which resembles the long-desired “love potion” of 
romance and literature. “Female animals treated with it 
take the initiative in courtship, even at an early age.” 
Injected into young animals, they “become mature before 
they normally would.” 

This hormone is an “extract of the contents” of the 
Graafian follicles. Why not? It is all plausible. Nothing 
seems more certain than that the sex impulse and all second- 
ary sexual characters in all mammalian females are depend- 
ent upon the normal functioning of the ovaries. The 
physiological and anatomical changes in the Graafian 
follicles during the life cycle are both profound and sig- 
nificant. As they are the source of the ova, it is reasonable 

227 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


to suppose that they carry the control of sex impulse or 
behavior and the acquired secondary characters. 

When the follicle erupts and discharges the ovum, it 
becomes the corpus luteum. When the corpus luteum is 
destroyed, pregnancy ends and ovulation is resumed. Hence 
the inference that the corpus luteum is responsible for uterine 
changes leading to the implantation of the embryo and for 
the early growth of the fetus. When corpora lutea are fed 
to hens, they lay no eggs; hence the inference that during 
pregnancy they inhibit the ripening of the Graafian follicle 
and so prevent ovulation and menstruation and restrain the 
sex impulse. They influence the mammary glands, but the 
development of these during pregnancy is believed to be due 
to hormones from the fetus to the maternal blood. The 
mamme themselves are not known to have any endocrine 
function. Their removal does not prevent child-bearing or 
have any other effect than “psychic and cosmetic,” according 
to Carlson. But removal of the ovary is removal of feminine 
nature. 

No mammals below Primates have anything approaching 
the specific lunar cycle of a woman’s life between puberty 
and the menopause. While slight menstrual hemorrhage 
occurs in many species of Primates, it is essentially a human 
process regulated by the normal and mature ovum, but its 
function is not yet understood nor is there agreement as to 
just what takes place or why there is such wide range of 
individual variation. The climacteric is reached when no 
more Graafian follicles mature. 

Disordered sex life—except the menopause—in woman 
may be due to other than ovarian deficiencies: other endo- 
crines may be involved, perhaps the adrenals or the pituitary. 
It is not certain that ovarian extracts are anything but 
extracts and so of possible value only through suggestion. 
Nor can luteal extracts check human ovulation; the corpus 
luteum can. Nor is it at all certain that any ovarian extracts 
on the market contain any hormone. It is certain that the 

228 





THE ENDOCRINE GLANDS AND THE CAUSES OF DEATH 


normal ovary, through its hormones, functions for all second- 
ary female characters and has the specific sex functions for 
such distant organs as uterus, placenta, and mamme. 

The functions of personal incubation assumed by one-half 
of the race ages ago necessitated an elaborate internal 
mechanism. For its perfect functioning, elaborate and com- 
plicated controls were necessary. It follows, and is 
biologically inevitable, that the sex life of the female of the 
human species is far more complex than is that of the male. 
But it is biologically conceivable that in a no great distant 
future reproduction in the human species can be radically 
altered. Under such controlled breeding, the ovaries of only 
physically sound individuals would be used and to the limit 
of their two hundred ova; these would be fertilized artificially 
and developed in man-made incubators. Such control of 
human life seems quite attainable; much moreso than the 
synthesis of life in any form. 


iu! 


The male gonads contain spermatogonia. These develop 
into germ-cells and fertilize the ovum. This involves two 
factors: the ovum is stimulated to develop; the male inherit- 
ance is afforded a vehicle. The gonad performs this 
function through external secretions. But as the spermato- 
gonia themselves are cells early set aside in embryonic 
development and are not products of chemical change as are 
the secretions of other duct glands, the gonads in their repro- 
ductive functions are not comparable to other glands. They, 
as the ovaries, are arsenals where ammunition for life is 
cultivated. 

Between the cell clusters where spermatogonia develop are 
other groups of cells, the interstitial cells of Leydig. These 
cells appear in the embryo before the spermatogonia cells. 
Under the X-rays they are not affected; the sperm-cells are. 
When the gonad does not descend, or in one transplanted into 

229 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


another body, the germ-cells atrophy; the Leydig cells are 
unaffected or may increase in size. Thus they show greater 
power of resistance than the germ-cells; they are embry- 
ologically older. 

Absence, atrophy, or extirpation of the gonads in the 
young male prevents the appearance of the secondary sexual 
characters—beard, change in the larynx and character of 
skeleton—and checks development of the reproductive 
mechanism. It also delays the final ossification of the heads 
of the long bones and the sutures of the skull. It lowers the 
rate of metabolism, increases the tendency to take on fat, and 
lowers vasomotor irritability. It perhaps leads to changes in 
the endocrine system, enlarging the adrenal cortex and the 
pituitary, diminishing thyroid growth, checking thymus 
involution. It changes behavior: less bold, less pugnacious, 
more infantile; it ‘shuts off the sex impulse. In the adult, 
loss of gonads stops the sex impulse and tends to atrophy 
of the reproductive mechanism, to obesity and lowered 
metabolism. 

Nothing else. Life is not shortened, nor mental or 
physical efficiency impaired. Hence, as Carlson points out, 
““srowing old” is not to be charged to gonad dysfunction, but 
to damage by age to all the tissues of the body. Gonad; 
removal leads only to loss of structure and function specific 
for sex life. 

Curiously, evidence seems to indicate that gonadectomy 
in the two sexes leads to opposite changes in the adrenals: 
in males, to an increase of 15 per cent; in females, to a 
decrease of 20 per cent. The net result is to increase the 
resemblance between the two sexes. 

The spermatogonia cells are simply future germs. This 
throws the responsibility for the regulation of the develop- 
ment of sex mechanism and function on the interstitial cells. 
Moore has recently furnished new proof of this. In 
cryptorchic individuals (the gonads remain within the 
abdominal cavity) there may or there may not be spermato- 

230 


\ eS ea 


THE ENDOCRINE GLANDS AND THE CAUSES OF DEATH 


gonia; if not, the individual is, of course, sterile, but if the 
Leydig cells are present, the individual is male in structure, 
function, and behavior. 

When the vas deferens or excretory duct of the gonad is 
ligatured, the spermatogonia are said, but not proved, to 
atrophy; the germ-cells cannot, of course, be discharged and 
consequently the individual is sterile. But as long as the 
Leydig cells are intact, sex life is unimpaired. This is the 
basis of the famous operation of Steinach, and is based on 
two assumptions: that ligation of the vas deferens increases 
Leydig cell growth; that it causes the spermatogonia appa- 
ratus to atrophy. Neither of these assumptions is yet proved; 
in fact, Oslund asserts that both assumptions are contrary 
to fact, that vasectomy produces no testicular changes and 
“cannot be looked upon as a method of causing rejuve- 
nescence.” | 

When gonads are transplanted into other male bodies, the 
individual maintains sex life as long as enough Leydig cells 
remain alive. This was Steinach’s first method of “‘rejuvena- 
tion”: “‘a biological futility, a catering by the surgeon to the 
elements of sex degeneracy,” says Carlson. And adds: if the 
transplant be from goat or monkey, “the surgeon is the 
monkey, the patient is the goat.” 

Grafts of goats or monkeys are not yet known to become 
vascularized, nor is it known that the Leydig cells survive 
up to two years. It is known that the sperm-cells do not 
survive transplanting. It is not settled how long a gonad will 
live after removal: “most glands die in a few hours.” At 
most, the graft can only temporarily restore the sex impulse; 
any true “‘rejuvenescence” of mind or body can only come 
from suggestion. 

Suggestion likewise, thinks Carlson, is all that backs the 
whole tribe of “genital” extracts on the market and which 
are guaranteed “cures” for everything from growing pains 
to melancholia, including goiter, scurvy, cholera, anemia, 
delirium tremens, and syphilis. 

231 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


The adrenal cortex and Leydig cells have a common 
embryonic origin, but they come to have quite different 
functions. No gland can play the réle of the Leydig cells; 
if they are lost, sex life is lost. The only compensation 
possible is in the direction of general metabolism. 

In both sexes, gonad hormones are specific regulators of 
sex characters up to puberty; the hormones that sustain sex 
life during maturity are possibly quite different from those 
which determined development. They are the catalyzers of 
development; they must vary with the stage or degree of 
development. 


12 


The race of bisexual animals depends on the coming 
together of male and female. Moths find their mates by 
their olfactory antenne; fishes, by color and behavior; frogs, 
by voice and touch; birds, by voice and sight; mammals, by 
scent. Man is a mammal, but he has traded his scent organ 
for a nose and he kills his odor with soaps or artificial 
scents. He discovers his mate, as do birds, by voice and 
sight. Either sex, deprived of the gonads, has no need for 
secondary characters; nor do they appear unless the gonads 
function as endocrine or “puberty” glands. That is the busi- 
ness of the hormones of the gonads: so to catalyze developing 
structure that the two sexes already determined in prenatal 
development will not look or sound alike, but will look and 
sound good to each other. Secondary sex characters, there- 
fore, are additional devices of nature for making each sex 
easily recognized by and more attractive to the opposite sex. 
Hence the “instinctive” repugnance of normal men for 
“manly” women; of normal women for “womanly” men. 

Puberty means sexual maturity; the individual is ready 
to assume the next stage in normal development: parentage. 
Modern life departs from the normal; it pays no attention to 
the facts of puberty. The age of marriage tends to become 

232 


THE ENDOCRINE GLANDS AND THE CAUSES OF DEATH 


more and more remote from sex maturity; the education of 
the youth proceeds as though there were no such thing as 
puberty. 

In normal life in girls, as in the females of all mammals, 
the milk glands at puberty take on rapid growth. The most 
noticeable changes in the boy are the appearance of hair 
on the face and a startling change in the growth of the 
' cartilages and vocal cords of the larynx. The voice at first 
breaks; by the time it becomes normal again it has, as a rule, 
dropped one full octave. Meanwhile the boy outgrows his 
collars faster than he does his hats. In both sexes hair 
appears on the pubes. 

While early growth depends on the amount and nature of 
the food and on general hygienic conditions, puberty as a 
rule appears earliest in individuals of short stature. Thus, 
it comes earlier among Italians than Scandinavians, the 
difference agreeing with the relative statures of the two 
peoples. 

Girls of European descent grow faster than boys between 
the ages of ten and fifteen. Between eleven and fourteen the 
girls are actually taller; between twelve and fifteen, heavier. 
At fifteen the rate of the girl’s growth begins to diminish. 
The skeleton begins to mature, for both sexes, at puberty. 
The girl’s pelvic girdle undergoes a marked change in width. 
She also becomes more plump. 

Between the fourteenth and eighteenth years for girls, and 
between the fifteenth and twentieth years for boys, a new 
impulse enters life. This impulse, only vaguely present 
before, is now the impelling force. For this reason: puberty 
means more than mere physical change, it means sex 
maturity; it is a result as well as an event. Besides the 
physical changes which increase the demands for food- 
energy, the whole organism is involved in maturity. 

The boy or girl is now preoccupied with a new order of 
internal affairs. This necessarily involves the entire nervous 
mechanism—not in its structure, but in the nature of the 

7 233 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


situations to which it must now adjust the individual. The 
second great crisis in life is at hand. It is a different indi- 
vidual, the world itself is different. Up till now the 
primordial instinct of self-preservation has had only one 
main drive: food-hunger; to this is now added the drive of 
mate-hunger. It enters the race fresh and will have its say. 
The body itself, under both direct and indirect influence of 
the sex mechanism, is stirred to its depths. ‘The inhibitory 
centers in the spinal cord are lowered; the susceptibility of 
the brain is increased through the vasomotor nerves. 

The outcome of the conflict is determined by many 
factors. In animal life and the majority of the human race, 
the result is courtship and mating. We generally solve the 
problem satisfactorily, but promiscuity and certain unbi- 
ologic and unsocial habits, with sex complexes leading to 
neuroses, seem to be increasing. | 

But the real point in all this is that the gonads normally 
do function as endocrine glands. As a consequence the 
two sexes do differ, in bodily structure, in behavior, in 
organic necessity. As Ellis puts it: “A man is a man to 
his very thumbs, and a woman is a woman down to her little 
toes.” Specialization in bodies is older than civilization, 
and there has always been a real difference between men 
and women beyond that of the primary sex organs. Which 
prompts Keith to remark: “No legislation can blot out 
structural differences that have taken geological epochs to 
produce.” But substitution of gonads can. In fact, Riddle 
cites two cases of female birds that laid eggs and were in all 
respects true females; they ceased to be females, became 
males in form and function, and fathered young. No sur- 
gical operation involved: only destruction of female organs 
due to tuberculosis; male organs replaced them, followed by 
male behavior. What all this signifies is not yet known. 
But this much, at least: sexual characters depend on sex 
hormones; complete sex-transformation in adults is possible. 

234 


THE ENDOCRINE GLANDS AND THE CAUSES OF DEATH 


13 


Shorn of her locks and dressed in man’s costume, woman 
is still woman. Yet how many times she has passed for a 
man—as a sailor, a soldier, a coal-miner! Her femininity 
tends to disappear beneath the male’s make-up. The two 
sexes differ in degree rather than in kind. 

The assumption that women are not as “adult” as men 
has no basis in fact. Yet we keep hearing about the 
“infantile” character of woman! Her body does more nearly 
resemble the infant’s than does the male’s, but this only 
states half the truth. In all that is essentially “human,” her 
body is more human than man’s. The adult male may be 
less infantile than the adult female; he is also less essentially 
“human.” 

The typical female skull is so delicate and smooth that 
sex can be postulated nineteen times out of twenty. It has 
none of the asperities, ridges, and prominences which mark 
the skull of the male. The bones of her face, especially of 
the jaws, are much more “human” than are the corresponding 
bones in man’s jaws. | 

The weight of the skull compared with the weight of the 
long bones shows this interesting progression: greatest pro- 
portionate weight of skull, children first, women next; then 
short men, tall men, apes. In weight of skull compared with 
that of thigh bones, the advantage again is with woman. 

Our pelvic girdle is in some respects more “human” than 
the skull itself. It is the distinguishing sex trait in the skele- 
ton. To the trained observer there is no mistaking the pelvic 
girdle of a female for that of a male. A moment’s reflection 
will show why this should be so. In man, the pelvis supports 
the abdominal viscera and continues the support of the 
upright body from the legs. To perform these two functions 
it became modified in two directions: broader, by expansion 
of the iliac crests; more compact and substantial, by a 
greater, broader sacrum. ‘The sacrum is the key of the 
. 235 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


pelvic arch; it carries the backbone, and incidentally the 
entire upper part of the body. Woman’s pelvis has traveled 
further than man’s in this regard. Her breadth across iliac 
crests is proportionately greater than the depth from pubic 
symphysis to top of sacrum. Her sacrum also is more dis- 
tinctively human in its great breadth. 

The two bones which form the basin of the pelvis—of 
which the iliac crests are easily felt beneath the skin at the 
sides of our abdomen—meet in front to form the pubic 
symphysis. The joint of the symphysis is made by a strong 
ligament which yields under pressure. In the male pelvis the 
ligament is narrow; in the female, wide. The slope of the 
pubic bones below the joint.is also greater in the female, an 
additional factor in enlarging the outlet of her pelvis. 

Can our pelvic girdle become more “human”? The upper 
rim might become better adjusted to support the body, but 
a girdle so narrowed as to prevent childbirth stops variation 
in that direction. This seems to set a limit to the size of the 
human brain at birth. In most still-born deliveries the head 
is too large to pass the bony outlet of the pelvis. We may 
assume that the limit of brain size at birth has been reached. 

Man’s pelvis is long, narrow, strong; woman’s, broad, 
shallow, delicate, roomy. Her thighs are relatively greater. 
Her carriage differs from man’s because the heads of her 
thigh bones are farther apart. As she transfers her body 
from one thigh to the other in walking, she must make a 
greater effort. Her pelvis is a compromise between an arch 
to support viscera and an outlet to make childbirth possible. 

Women among so-called savages are notoriously as strong 
as men, although there is always a division of labor between 
the sexes. The most splendid human bodies I have ever 
seen were those of black women working under extremely 
primitive conditions in gold and emerald mines in South 
America. Their backs, shoulders, and arms spoke of great 
strength, but there were no bulging muscles. Even apart 

236 








_ THE ENDOCRINE GLANDS AND THE CAUSES OF DEATH 


from their breasts, their bodies were unmistakably 
“feminine.” 

The luxuriant head hair of women of European descent is 
not a mark of sex: it is the barber that makes—or made— 
the difference. Chinese and Indians were proud of their hair 
and had as much of it as their spouses. Head hair is a race 
and culture and not a sex factor. 

Sex differences are strongly marked in brain size among 
man and apes. The male gorilla’s brain is 18 per cent 
larger than the female’s; the orang’s, 14 per cent; the chim- 
panzee’s, 8 per cent; man’s, 12 per cent. But the disparity 
is due to general disproportion in size between the two sexes. 
Structurally the brains of the two sexes are the same, and as 
compared to weight of body are heavier in women than in 
men. If a relatively large brain is a “human” trait, the 
brain of the child stands highest, woman next. 

More males are born than females; in the so-called white 
races, about 105 males for every 100 females. Yet woman’s 
longevity counter-balances the disproportion; at the age of 
fifty, unless migrations or wars upset the calculation, we may 
expect to find as many women as men. 

Differences between the two sexes, yes. The male spe- 
cializes in the direction of brute strength and the courage 
that goes with it; the female retains her youthfulness in body 
in general and especially in face and neck. With age some 
women begin to appear neutral, halfway between man and 
woman. But the vicious element in such phrases as 
““Woman’s proper work” and “Woman’s true sphere” is the 
assumption implied of lack of capacity. To assume that her 
capacity for intelligent behavior or human adjustments is 
less than man’s is biologically and physiologically absurd. 

Comte’s idea is better biology and sound psychology: 
“Between two beings so complex and so diverse as man and 
woman, the whole of life is not too long for them to ‘know 
one another well and to learn to love one another worthily.” 

237 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


14 


The endocrines are new to science; some have only recently 
been discovered; the function of some only recently sus- 
pected; not one is yet perfectly understood. Yet their 
astounding importance, and the claims quacks make that 
gland “extracts” are cure-alls and gonad operations a Foun- 
tain of Youth, conspire to whet the appetite for facts faster 
than the laboratories can sift them out. Hence new crops 
of quacks who dispense pills or elixirs or their services with 
a knife or a ligature; and a raft of literature which, as 
Hoskins says, “for its vagaries, fantastic exuberance, and 
wholesale marvel-mongering, is without a peer in the history 
of modern science.” 

Little is yet known of endocrine co-operation, or what takes 
place in some when others fail. No gland or other organ 
functions for or by itself, or lives a life of independence; 
the entire body mechanism makes up the organism. The 
business of the glands is the business of the body as a going 
concern, to keep it fit and enable it to function, as infant, 
as youth, as adult, as senility overtakes it. 

Carlson thinks the following endocrine teamwork proba- 
ble: the gonads cannot function if. the thyroid and possibly 
the pituitary and adrenal cortex are subnormal; removal of 
thyroid and probably of gonads stimulates the pituitary; 
thyroid extract seems to stimulate the adrenals and the 
pituitary, as it does the heart, liver, and kidneys; removal 
of the thyroid stimulates the parathyroids—at least in tad- 
poles; tumor of the adrenals induces gonad precocity; 
removal of the gonads retards atrophy of the thymus and 
leads to change in pituitary and adrenal cortex. 


It seems certain that removal of the thyroid is followed by | 


cretinism in children, myxedema in adults; of the para- 

thyroids, by death; of the pancreas, by death; of the adrenals, 

by death; of the pituitary, by infantilism in children, by 

impotence in adults; of the thymus, by sexual precocity; of 
238 


a 


THE ENDOCRINE GLANDS AND THE CAUSES OF DEATH 


the gonads, by sex infantilism in children, by atrophy of 
secondary sex characters in adults; of the pineal, by no 
known endocrine effect. 

Most of each endocrine may be removed from an animal 
without apparent loss of function of its internal secretion; 
the inference is that no endocrine normally works to its full 
capacity. A normal thyroid stores up enough to last several 
weeks; the adrenin reserve only suffices for a few hours. But 
in general almost nothing is known of the storage capacity 
or rate of production of hormones. It is known that symp- 
toms may not appear after removal of the thyroid for weeks 
or months. Removal of the pancreas is followed by 
symptoms within ten hours; of the parathyroids and adrenal 
cortex, almost at once. 

Post-mortems prove these connections: thyroid with 
cretinism and myxedema; adrenals with Addison’s disease 
and death; pituitary with infantilism; pancreas with diabetes. 

Known positive results from large endocrines or excessive 
endocrine secretions are few; it is not yet proved that large 
glands yield large results. It is only inference that excessive 
thyroid secretion causes toxic goiter; of the anterior lobe of 
the pituitary, gigantism; of the adrenal medulla and the 
thyroids, excess pep; of the adrenal cortex, the pineal and 
pituitary, sex precocity; of the gonads, excessive sex urge; 
of the thyroid, diabetes. Results claimed for excessive 
thymus and pineal activity are not yet proved. As their loss 
produces no known effect, what could necessarily result from 
their increased function? 

Can endocrine disorders be “cured” through the nerves 
of endocrine secretion? The pineal, the posterior lobe of the 
pituitary, and the medulla of the adrenals are themselves . 
modified nerve cells. But, except the medulla, neither the 
cutting of all the nerves to all the endocrines nor artificial 
stimulation shows any effect on the body or change in the 
glands themselves. The nerves to the endocrines seemingly 
have little or nothing to do with their secretions. But most 

239 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


quacks feed their patients “gland extracts.”” Few hormones 
are yet known. Apart from insulin, adrenalin, pituitrin, and 
thyroxin, the quacks themselves know nothing further of any 
of the various extracts they often feed for unknown diseases. 
With “diet and rest,” extracts are as potent as the bread pills 
of old. 

The endocrines are part of the body, and so subject to 
heredity, tumors, lesions, tuberculosis and other infections, 
especially to faulty metabolism. The influence of the thyroid 
and pancreas on general metabolism and growth is funda- 
mental. They must, therefore, influence all the body, includ- 
ing all the glands. The thyroid normally functions only if 
there is enough iodine in the food. If in doubt, take cod- 
liver oil or eat sea grass. 


I5 


The endocrine glands are intrinsic parts of the body, in 
intimate touch with living processes. Muscular activity 
starts the sweat glands, the muscles are fed with sugar, the 
adrenals pour their secretion into the blood to neutralize the 
toxins of fatigue, and so on. 

Arrest of development or over-stimulation of the endo- 
crines brings about change which may be harmful or of 
benefit to the body. Giants, fat women, cretins, men and 
women under-sexed and over-sexed, imply variation in the 
structure and functioning of these glands. Apparently some 
individuals are better fitted for the work of life than others; 
still others are so well fitted that they overdo it. No two 
human beings are exactly alike; they do not and cannot act 
alike. We should hesitate before passing harsh moral judg- 
ments upon activities due to inherited or acquired physical 
structure. 

Possibly several generations must pass before the real and 
definite function of the endocrines is fully understood. Possi- 
bly new drugs will replace the old; pills compounded on 

240 





THE ENDOCRINE GLANDS AND THE CAUSES OF DEATH 


formule learned in nature’s laboratory, elixirs for all the 
ills of body and mind we are now heir to. The fact that 
the emotions are expressions of states under control of the 
glands and closely bound up with the sympathetic nervous 
system opens up an enormous field for speculative possi- 
bilities. Russell thinks it will be possible to make people 
hot-headed or timid, strongly or weakly sexed, and so on, 
as may be desired. In case of war the timid souls will simply 
be injected with certain glandular extracts or synthesized 
regulators! 

There is another angle. Almost nothing has yet been done 
on the racial anatomy of the endocrines. Are shape and 
size of head, face, nose, eyes, teeth, lips, length of limbs, 
and stature, character and shape of hair, due to the activity 
of the endocrines? Keith thinks this possible and suggests 
that whites are what they are because they have more thyroid, 
adrenal, pituitary, and gonad hormones than other races, and 
that inherited condition of glands points a mechanism through 
which heredity controls development and established type 
variations. Racial character—such as emotional reactions, 
intellectual capacity, and personality in general—would thus 
vary likewise, and for the same reason. 

This compounding of elixirs for all ills from endocrines, 
and the solution of the problem of race and individual varia- 
bility by reference to variation in glandular mechanism and 
functioning, take us too far from reality, too far into possi- © 
bilities. We of to-day are going concerns and our interest 
in the past is only in the light it can shed on what we are 
and can do to-day. And that is a personal question—for 
this reason: 

No two human beings are alike. Every human being con- 
tinues throughout life to change. The question, What is 
good for the human machine as a going concern? is, there- 
fore, always personal and individual; it all depends. Some 
want to go fast, others prefer to go slow. One may see ideal 
life only in the chest of Hercules; another, in the wings on 

241 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


the feet of Mercury. But most humans are born right; there 
is nothing the matter with our inheritance. 

There is a normal rate of growth and of growing old. 
Too much or too little upsets the normal rate. With nothing 
to chew on, normal development of jaws, teeth, muscles and 
glands of mastication need not be expected. Without work 
or play, normal development of the bones and muscles of 
the motor mechanism is not to be expected. “Exercises” and 
“physical culture” are too often taken as pills and drugs: 
controls, but not cures. 

Glued to a chair with head tied to an account book or a 
last makes for less than the normal work designed by nature 
for heart and lungs. By and by lungs and heart lose their 
original capacity for work, as do muscles which are never 
extended. 

Man has inherited a body of a certain type which functions 
best under certain conditions of food, work, rest, sleep, etc. 
These conditions also are part of each individual’s inherit- 
ance and consequently must vary with individuals. Sauce 
for the goose is not necessarily sauce for the gander. It is 
true that some Jack Sprats can eat no fat, their wives can 
eat no lean. | 

The real question, then, for adults, is personal. Is my 
machine capable of giving the service I shall require to 
carry me where I want to go? Many are ready enough to 
answer, No. But they are not willing to distinguish between 
hunger and appetite or count calories instead of cost; and 
they will walk a mile for a cigarette, but not a foot for 
health’s sake. 

But every child is entitled, in civilization as in savagery, 
to the full development of its normal inheritance. Civiliza- 
tion has taken curious, often monstrous, bents; and even 
now in many places does not hesitate to deny children the 
free exercise of their human birthright to develop sound 
minds in sound bodies. 

242 


THE ENDOCRINE GLANDS AND THE CAUSES OF DEATH 


16 


“How can a man be born when he is old?” asked Nico. 
demus. And answered his question with another, “Can he 
enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?” 

Life does grow old and young again, but nature knows of 
no such rebirth as puzzled the brain of Nicodemus and has 
become entangled in the folk-customs of so many peoples. 
Growing old and growing young again are age changes, both, 
in Child’s words, “merely one aspect of Werden und 
Vergehen, the Becoming and Passing-away which make up 
the history of the universe.” 

What is it that grows old and young again? “Life” grows 
old. What is “life”? We have certain criteria—none too 
good—for living beings; and certain criteria for death. But 
life itself, can it be defined or described? Is it a thing or 
an action, a process or a function? There are living beings 
and processes or functions of living. But life cannot be 
restricted by this or that process or function, nor described 
as this or that chemical compound; nor as any one certain 
or particular form. Life is something more than process or 
function, compound or form. 

Life is a result of action in something. The “something” 
is a physical body of protoplasm. The “‘action” is change, 
many and complex and dynamic. Dynamic changes and 
physical body are inseparable; they influence and condition 
each other. 

Man himself is such a physico-chemical system of dynamic 
changes. What disturbs this system disturbs the being; the 
being is the system. If the disturbance is so great that the 
being cannot readjust itself, the system breaks down, the 
being dies. 

Probably we shall never know just how life itself began. 
If we could concoct a reaction-complex capable of living, 
we might not know just when life begins. The complex 

243 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


structure and the dynamic process known in living beings 
are always bound by a bond which, broken, ends life. 

Hence life is unlike any machine made by man. In 
machines, dynamic processes take place in complex struc- 
tures, but we can always distinguish between process and 
structure. Nor can the machine function until the structure 
is completed. But the living being always functions and 
has been functioning since life began. The structure deter- 
mined function, function determined structure. In other 
words, life constructs its own machine by living. 

Living means changing. Living processes depend on 
change. The body during growth adds to itself certain chem- 
ical compounds which are physiologically stable; that is, 
they are of such a nature that they can be built into the body. 
The energy used up during the building or growth period 
is furnished by the oxidation of less stable compounds. 

The growing child is a rapidly changing being. We age 
fastest during childhood. The rate of metabolism is then 
highest. In old age it slows down. In starvation, new com- 
pounds are not synthesized as fast as old compounds are 
broken down. But starvation only ends in death after many 
weeks because the most vital functions are carried on in the 
most active organs. Because of their activity they are fed, - 
first by stored fuel or fats, next by muscle. When this fuel 
is exhausted, death soon follows. 

Thus, growing and growing-old are simply two aspects of 
the same complex dynamic activity. Both are phases of 
production and progress. We shall know how to grow young 
when we know how to increase the rate of metabolism or 
vital change, and how to change the cells of the body so that 
an increase in rate of metabolism is possible. 

The nature of the rejuvenescence that hinges on the internal 
secretions of the sex glands is not part of the problem raised 
by Nicodemus. A man “renewing his youth” is one thing; 
Life growing young again is quite a different thing. 

Life resides only in living beings; the way they are born 

244, 





THE ENDOCRINE GLANDS AND THE CAUSES OF DEATH 


again when old is one phase of evolution. The process is . 
called reproduction, of which there are many methods. Have 
they all something in common? Or is there some unique 
quality in reproduction in man and higher animals not found 
in the lowest animals? Whether there is or not, the fate of 
the individual organisms concerned is different. Those that 
reproduce by division do not die; at any rate, as Weismann 
said, there is no “corpse.” Death does overtake those that 
reproduce bisexually. But reproduction in man is bisexual. 
Man, as individual, dies; he cannot be born again when he 
is old, or young. The life that is in him can grow young 
again; but only by a process known as reproduction. That 
is the nature of reproduction. 

Rebirth, then, as that word is commonly understood, is 
biologically inconceivable. It is possible that to-day complex 
chemical substances are in process of becoming of the nature 
of protoplasm in which living reactions take place, and which, 
could we observe them, would be recognized as living beings. 
But the laws of chance are against it and all our conceptions 
of evolution are against it. A possible “rebirth” is quite as 
improbable. 

All that is known of the facts of evolution and all theories 
as to the mechanism of evolution favor the idea that every 
man and every being alive to-day have been alive since life 
was evolved. It is even more certain that every man and 
every organism alive to-day began life as part of an adult or 
“old” organism. But as man and all organisms begin their 
individual existence as young organisms, it follows that 
something, somewhere, somehow, has renewed its youth, has 
become young again. 

Call this “something” life. Life itself has grown old 
during evolution. The life that is in man and in all living 
beings is old, millions of years old; it grows young through 
reproduction. 

There are only two great kinds of reproduction: without 
sex or agamic (no wife), and with sex or gametic (wife). 

245 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


In agamic reproduction, a new individual arises from part 
or parts of the body which have come to lie beyond the 
physiologic limit of size; they are physiologically isolated 
parts of the body. In gametic reproduction, as in man, the 
germs of life are also isolated—so far as the parent indi- 
vidual is concerned, “dead and shed,” Child says. But by 
adult life they are also already highly specialized and have 
already completed their growth. 

Weismann assumed that the germ-cells are young pee that 
they are special only in the sense that they are set aside at 
once in embryonic development for the purpose of reproduc- 
tion; hence the doctrine of the “continuity of the germ- 
plasm.” He also assumed that nothing could influence these 
cells; hence there could be no transmission of a character 
acquired by the body of the individual carrying these cells. 

But germ-cells in bisexual reproduction are in no sense 
‘young’; they are no more “special” than any other group 
of cells of the body. Only after the embryo has begun to 
build its body are the cells resulting from cell divisions set 
aside to become the store of future germ-cells. 

Ovum and sperm are old cells, especially the sperm. They 
are as differentiated as almost any cells of the body. They 
have ceased to grow; they have a low rate of metabolism; 
but the dynamic substratum present in both is old protoplasm, 
grown old during the long years of evolution. As a result 
it has become stable, highly individualized. Otherwise there 
could have been no evolution of such structural permanence 
and complexity as we find in man and higher animals. 

Hence evolution is not chiefly change in form, but change 
in the dynamic reaction system of protoplasm. As indi- 
vidual man develops and grows old, so evolution itself repre- 
sents a change from a less stable to a more stable condition 
in the dynamic reaction system. 

The protoplasm of the germ has also evolved. As a result 
of that evolution, it has reached such a stage of differentiation 
that it can no longer react alone, as it does in lower organ- 

246 


THE ENDOCRINE GLANDS AND THE CAUSES OF DEATH 


isms. Only by marriage of ovum and sperm is the carrier 
of life brought back to pre-embryonic conditions. Fertiliza- 
tion is the only rejuvenescence known to man and higher 
animals, 

By fertilization the old protoplasm of the ovum is recon- 
stituted, reduced, rejuvenated. The fertilized ovum is 
younger than ovum and sperm were before they united in 
fertilization. It begins life anew; and as a parasite. Having 
escaped from the old individual, it is no longer subject to 
the inhibitions of the old. Not until it begins its post-natal 
existence will it be subject to the inhibitions of human society. 

The fertilized human ovum is possibly less an “‘individual” 
than a protozoon, but that ovum is protoplasm which has 
been evolved to the point that within it is potentially present 
the foundation of the structure and form of an adult man or 
woman. That ovum can do what the growing child does: so 
transform food materials that it can build some into new 
protoplasm and incorporate the new within its body; it can 
oxidize other food materials to set free the energy it uses in 
building its body. This transformation of food materials is 
metabolism, change, the foundation of the function of life. 

Life itself, then, is change in protoplasm, itself a dynamic 
entity. Change or reaction is determined by its physico- 
chemical constitution and by its relation to the external world. 
Adaptations are thus seen as simply special features of this 
relation. The mechanism by which life renews its youth is 
such an adaptation. 

I agree with Child that it is impossible to conceive of evolu- 
tion and of so-called “adaptations” without assuming that 
“acquired characters” can be inherited. But often, as Child 
points out, tens of thousands of generations may have been 
necessary for such inheritance to become appreciable. 

Without such adaptation there would be no such living 
beings as man and higher animals. There might be some- 
thing else “just as good,” for, as Russell says, we have only 
our own word for it that man is superior to the ameba; we 

247 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


can have no idea what the ameba would think of the 
proposition. 

Nor need it necessarily disturb our self-esteem to realize 
that only our own conditioned human eyes See man as a 
“finished product” of evolution. Pearl aptly argues that 
Omnipotence could have made a much better machine than 
the human body—“‘that is, if he had first learned the trick 
of making a self-regulating and self-reproducing machine. 
Each part of the human body is only just good enough to 
get by—workmanship like that of an average man. If evolu- 
tion happens to be furnished with fine materials it has no 
objection to using them, but is equally ready to use shoddy 
if it will hold together long enough to get the machine by 
the reproductive period.” Which is another way of saying 
that evolution’s main concern is the continuation of life rather 
than of this or that kind of living beings. 

But this does not necessarily mean that senility and death 
are the inevitable ends of human existence, either as indi- 
viduals or as race. 


17 


Man and other warm-blooded animals are killed by 
freezing or by boiling, or by cutting off their air or food 
supply. Death comes also in other ways: foreign substances 
are taken in, or get into the body, which cannot be eliminated 
or combated; or vital parts of the body are injured by 
mechanical or other means. In other words, we die when 
the conditions necessary for life have been so changed that 
life becomes impossible. 

We are specific mechanisms in which certain physico- 
chemical changes occur in a certain routine order. We live 
as long as the mechanism is in good repair and the changes 
take place. Mechanism and changes are one. They only 
seem two when life is looked at from different angles. 
Together, they represent life: they balance; they are in 

248 


THE ENDOCRINE GLANDS AND THE CAUSES OF DEATH 


equilibrium; they are adjusted; they harmonize. Normally 
they go through life together, always preserving this har- 
mony. Cut off a leg: the blood does not stop circulating; 
it readjusts itself to the changed condition. If it cannot 
readjust, what is left of the machine stops. 

Anything which necessitates serious readjustment is 
pathologic. The body is diseased when under conditions to 
which it is not adjusted. There are almost as many diseases 
as there are cells in the body; certainly many more than there 
are tissues or organs. Disease in any cell, cell-group, tissue, 
organ, or system, is felt everywhere. The noise of a tooth- 
ache may be faint by the time it reaches the toe, but the toe 
is none the less interested. A gallstone may be of particular 
concern only to the liver, but the liver’s concern is the body’s 
concern. | 

Life is played to a certain tune; it need not be a monkey- 
wrench to set its chords jangling. An undigested bean will 
do, or a bean in the windpipe; or any one of a thousand 
things. But despite the nicety of the balances and co-ordina- 
tions which make for normal health, the body’s capacity for 
readjustment is remarkable. It is not we who fight for life, 
but our living bodies. They hang on to life in spite of much 
we do to discourage them. 

This fighting power is part of our inheritance. We cannot 
grow a new limb, much less a new head or a new trunk, as 
some animals can. We can store fuel fat as no lower animal 
can; and experience, as no other animal can. It is not to 
be charged to our inheritance if we fill our experience-loft 
with rubbish. We can make repairs; in some tissues, very 
extensive repairs. We can make antibodies. 

These antibodies illustrate the vast numbers and the 
enormous complexity of the processes that go on under our 
skin, and the fine adjustments that must always be going on 
to keep the body tuned up for the business of life. 

Something seems to happen when the body faces civiliza- 
tion. There is probably not a single adult in this country 

249 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


with a body in perfect tune: what the life-insurance com- 
panies would call “Class AA risk.” 

Of 1,000 employees examined by one motor company, 
just 1,000 were imperfect. Of a group of hundreds of 
thousands examined, 10 per cent had “slight defects,” the 
other 90 per cent had “defects not so slight.” Nearly 40 
per cent of the white school children of Washington have 
defects—teeth, vision, hearing, etc.—which can be located 
without removing their clothes. Over 45 per cent of Penn- 
sylvania’s youth were not physically fit to be sent overseas 
to be shot at. 

This means two things. 

More get past Cultural Selection than Natural Selection; 
the openings in the sieve are larger, the nature of the struggle 
is different. Runts which grow to Roosevelts and Steinmetzes 
in civilization die early in nature. Runts which become 
nothing but charges on society also survive in Cultural 
Selection. In other words, individuals with inherited or post- 
natal defects live because society supplies that which their 
bodies lack to maintain a balance on life. A freak in nature 
does not live long; in civilization, it makes good money. 

Millions of minor defects are due to bad food-digestion. 
We inherit omnivorous teeth and thirty feet of alimentary 
canal made for every kind of food but cooked and pre- 


digested. Also, powerful muscles hung to strong bones, 


leveraged for work. The body was built on the theory that 
these muscles would be worked. The very work the muscles 
are supposed to do is part of the process of living. The 
flow of lymph and the circulation of the blood in general 
depend on a mechanism built to function best when the motor 
apparatus is in motion. ‘That is why we have bones and 
muscles, and that is why we have blood and lymph. 

One bad tooth in an ancient skull or among savages is an 
anomaly. A perfect set in an adult American is a far greater 
anomaly. ‘Toothache means that the cavity is almost in to 
the nerve. That means almost in to the entire body. Our 

250 


THE ENDOCRINE GLANDS AND THE CAUSES OF DEATH 


body is a double sack, each sealed up tight. Whatever breaks 
through the wall of either sack (skin or alimentary canal) 
is a foreign body and potential death. 

Apart from congenital influence, most defects originate in 
the mouth or alimentary canal. Children are not born with 
defective gums, bad tooth germs, narrow palate, stunted jaws, 
adenoid growths, or diseased tonsils. Our inheritance is 
usually all right; we do not use it according to directions, 
The newborn comes with a full set of tools for building a 
full-grown, sound, healthy, defectless body; too often it is 
treated as a cunning little toy to a doting household for six 
years or so, and is thereafter chiefly of interest to the 
statistician collecting Defects or Defectives. 

Metabolism is adjustment for the functions of life. We 
inherit an adjustment machinery adapted for a certain kind 
of active life, but before it is of age we have taught it a 
“civilization” that was never contemplated by the designer 
of the machine. Civilization is kept busy keeping the 
machine in repair. ; 

One good defect deserves another. Defects lead to other 
defects. Many bodies are kept so busy repairing leaks in 
the lungs, or picking cinders out of the fuel, or keeping 
foreigners out of the blood, that they have no time for the 
main business of life: giving their owner a lifelong joy-ride. 


18 


Weismann held that death is an “advantageous adapta- 
tion.” For what? To whom? Looks like nonsense. Osler 
said that man is as old as his arteries. There was enough 
truth in this to make it take. It means even less to say that 
man is as old as his endocrine glands. Arteries and glands 
are as old as the man. 

Metchnikoff held that because of “disharmonies” in the 
body, the phagocytes devoted too much time to eating pigment 
in hair and too little to the bacterial flora of our digestive 

251 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


tract. Result: fermentation, poison, death. His theory beat 
the gland-treatment theory into the drug stores, but sour milk 
is losing ground as a cure for old age. 

Puberty is a period, but a kind of sex life begins at birth; 
for many, real sexual maturity never comes. So it is with 
adults; some are more adult in body and mind at fifteen than 
others at thirty-five; some hurry through to senility before 
body and mind have become fully adult. Normal old age 
is physiological; it is no more a disease than adolescence, 
and should be as agreeable. In pathologic old age, senility 
is premature and is a disease. The seat of the disease may 
be anywhere or may be due to bacterial infection. 

In natural death, we die by inches. But while there is only 
one path by which we may enter the world, as Pearl points 
out in his remarkable book on Death, there are many that 
lead to the River Styx. Death does not strike at random, but 
in an orderly way; and there are many ways of dying. We 
die when an essential part of our body breaks down. 

From an analysis of the mortality tables of England and 
Wales, the United States, and S40 Paulo, Brazil, Pearl found 
that over half the deaths in all three countries are due te 
faulty wind and food canals. While both canals are inside 
the body, they come in contact with air, food, and water from 
the outside. The skin also is exposed to the world, but it is 
armorplate against foreign invasion. Wind and food canals 
have no such protecting layer of pavement cells as has the 
skin. Outer skin and lining of wind and food canals con- 
stitute the body’s first line of defense against invasion of 
bacteria. 

The next chief cause of death is the circulatory system; 
the blood is the body’s second line of defense. When the 
first fails to check the enemy, the way to the blood is open. 
Hence the great part played by the circulatory system as the 
second great cause of death. As Pearl says, we should live 
much longer if our lungs were as good as our heart. 

The death rates show certain important age and sex fluctu- 

202 


THE ENDOCRINE GLANDS AND THE CAUSES OF DEATH 


ations. Early infancy deaths are heavy. There is then a 
sharp drop until the 10-15-year period, when the rate begins 
to rise to the 20-25-year period. Thereafter the rate rises 
slowly until the 50-55-year period, when it begins to rise 
again rapidly. 

The death rate from failure of circulatory system rises 
steadily from maturity until the eighty-fifth year, when it 
slows down. But between the fifth and thirty-fifth years this 
rate is higher in females than in males, presumably because 
the changes accompanying puberty are graver. Up to the 
sixty-fifth year deaths from breakdown of the sex apparatus 
are also much greater in females. 

The chief cause of death among males during the first year 
is from the food canal; after that, to the sixtieth year, the 
respiratory system; after the sixtieth year, the circulatory 
system. | 

Nearly 60 per cent of the deaths were from organs derived 
from the endoderm or inner germ-layer—the layer that orig- 
inally was outside the body. In the developing embryo that 
layer comes to be folded within the body and lines the food 
canal and accessory organs of digestion. It is an old-fash- 
ioned, out-of-date relic of antediluvian ectoderm. As a lining 
for the food canal it is our weakest spot. 

Our strongest spots are the skin cover of our body and our 
nervous system. Both are derived from the ectoderm or 
outer germ-layer. Deaths from structures derived from this 
layer make up only about 10 per cent of the total. Almost 
no germs get through a healthy skin. The cells of skin and 
nerves have differentiated most from their primitive structure. 

The remaining 30 per cent of deaths are from the meso- 
derm or middle germ-layer, circulatory and urogenital 
systems and muscles. The breakdown of the female repro- 
ductive organs is also a heavy factor in infant mortality. 

While mortality due to breakdown in ectoderm organs is 
about the same for the two sexes, female mortality from 

253 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


mesoderm is as great as from endoderm breakdown twenty 
years before it is in males. 

Death comes, then, according to Pearl, because our bodies 
are made up of systems specialized in structure and function. 
In becoming specialized, their cells have become so differ- 
entiated that they have lost the power of indefinite and inde- 
pendent existence. Thus the cells lining our lungs can be 
nourished only if the cells of the food tract and the blood 
keep on the job. Some systems are better made than others. 
The brain outwears the heart, the heart outwears the lungs. 

The striking agreement as to the causes of death which 
Pearl finds in such dissimilar countries as England, the 
United States, and Sao Paulo, force him to conclude that 
innate constitutional factors, along with environmental 
factors, largely determine rates of human mortality. In cer- 
tain diseases, of course, environment is the important 
factor. 

The causes of death, Pearl finds, are in the following 
descending order: respiratory system; digestive system; cir- 
culatory system and blood; nervous system and sense organs; 
kidneys and related excretory organs; sex organs; skeletal 
and muscular system; skin; endocrine organs. Or, arranged 
proportionately according to embryonic germ-layer origin: 
endoderm diseases 5.2 and mesoderm diseases 3.8 times 
those of ectoderm origin. 

We may be as old as our arteries—and so no good for 
digging a sewer; but we are also as young as our brains— 
and so, good where brains are needed. But when any vital 
system breaks down, the machine stops and we are dead. 


Lo 


Medical authorities believe they could add thirteen years 
to life if given full control in cases where death could reason- 
ably be prevented. A better life insurance is to pick parents 
who will live to be eighty; they will give you a twenty-year 

254 





THE ENDOCRINE GLANDS AND THE CAUSES OF DEATH 


better hope of longevity than parents who will die under 
sixty. They are the best life insurance. 

Why not? Each group of animals has its normal span 
of life. Also man. Human beings vary; most of their 
specific characters are inherited. Longevity is a specific 
character, longevity also is inherited. 

Those who live to great age as a rule are children of 
parents who lived to great age. If one cannot choose both 
parents who will live to old age, it is better to choose a long- 
lived father than a long-lived mother. Four per cent more 
children lived to be eighty where the father, but not the 
mother, lived to be eighty, than where the opposite condition 
prevailed. 

Karl Pearson concluded from a study of the life span of 
brothers that environment is not the important factor in 
longevity; also, that from one-half to three-fourths of deaths 
are predetermined at birth by inheritance factors. This con- 
clusion has never been advertised by health resorts or elixir 
manufacturers. 

Death rates and life spans are but two phases of the prob- 
lem of longevity. If environment—including health resorts, 
elixirs, poverty, and bacteria—is not the factor in death 
rates, it cannot be the factor in the life span. 

From one-half to three-fourths of the death rate is selec- 
tion: death comes when one has used up one’s inherited 
capacity for life. Adults of sound body are more likely to 
leave offspring than those of weak; their children are more 
likely to survive. Weaklings may survive to maturity, their 
children are less likely to survive. 

Hence the high infant death rate in the first two years; 
the unfit are weeded out. Natural Selection is still at work; 
it has always been at work. This rate is especially high 
among children of unsound parents. Hygiene and prevention 
lower the rate during these two dangerous years— prolonging 
lives to succumb at a later but early stage. 

4 banana fly of ninety days is as old as a man of ninety 

255 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


years. Twenty-four hours after emerging from the pupa 
stage. the female fly lays eggs. These in one day become 
larvee, pupe three days later, adults five days later; ten days 
to a generation. Pearl tested the life-span inheritance theory 
on these flies. More females than males survived—as in 
man. The only fly that lived to be eighty-one days old was a 
female. Long-lived parents bred offspring that lived long. 
Pearson was right: duration of life is an inherited character. 

How about germs of diphtheria, tuberculosis, etc.? Loeb 
tested this on flies, with the surprising result that those kept 
free from bacteria were possibly shorter-lived than germ- 
laden flies, certainly no longer. The experiments indicated 
“that higher organisms must die from internal causes even 
if all chances of infection and all accidents are excluded.” 

We are never without bacteria; we could not live without 
them; there is no habitable spot on earth free of them. Of 
humans who have reached the thirty-fifth year, 95 per cent 
have been infected at one time or another with the bacillus 
of tuberculosis; in less than one in ten does it become active. 

Death rates in the poverty lanes of Paris and London do 
not tally. In Paris the excess death rate in the poorest as 
against the richest quarter is 104 per cent; in London, only 
30. The lowest death rate in London is not in the richest 
quarter. The real influence of poverty on death rates could 
only be determined by transposing the inhabitants of the two 
groups and comparing rates. The “poor” of Paris and 
London are not necessarily biologically poor. 

It is the pace that kills. “General Sherman,” the giant 
redwood, was killed at the age of 2,171 years. He was a 
seedling in 271 Bs. c. He never knew what hurry meant. 
Nor did the tortoise that lived 350 years. The faster we 
live, the sooner we live life up. Rate of living is a factor 
in longevity. Slonacker tested this on rats. He put four in 
squirrel cages and let them race. The average life span of 
the marathoners was 29.5 months; one lived thirty-four 
months and ran 5,447 miles. Three other rats were reared 

256 


THE ENDOCRINE GLANDS AND THE CAUSES OF DEATH 


in squirrel cages, but were not permitted to race; their 
average span was 48.3 months. 

Loeb tried flies. Cold makes flies sluggish; those at cold 
temperature lived longer than those at high. At 86 degrees, 
his flies lived 21 days; at 68 degrees, 54 days; at 60 degrees, 
124 days. From which he inferred that if we could keep - 
our blood temperature at about 45 degrees, we might hope 
to live about 1,900 years. But life would be at a low level! 

Unfortunately, our early ancestors left no trustworthy vital 
statistics. But from trustworthy inferential data there is 
reason to believe, as we might expect on purely biologic 
grounds, that longevity is on the increase. At least, life 
expectancy has improved during the last 2,000 years. Of 
100 Romans born in Egypt in the days of the Empire, only 
9 could expect to live 68 years. Of 100 English alive at 
10, 39 live to be 68. Women especially had less expectancy 
of life in Roman days than now—they were in luck to be 
alive at 25. But a Roman of 78 years was a better risk than 
an American of the same age; a Roman had to be very hardy 
to live beyond 70. In America, many weaklings are carried 
up to 60; beyond that age their expectancy rapidly 
diminishes. 

From which we conclude that modern environment is 
better for man, or that man is fitter for modern environment. 


20 


Life goes on: only individuals die. Some individuals 
apparently are also endowed with immortality—such are the 
Protozoa or one-cell organisms. Nearly all Metazoa or 
many-cell organisms die—their endowment is mortal. 

Man also is a Metazoon. All men die. Must they die? 
Until recently this would have been a foolish question. It 
cannot yet be answered, but experiments now going on for 
twenty-five years give us food for thought. 

Since boys have been boys it has been known that the 

204 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


snake’s tail does not die until the sun goes down. For ages 
it has been well known that many animals have the power 
to grow certain missing parts. A fish-worm cut in two grows 
into two worms—the head grows a tail, the tail a head. Cut 
a crab’s eye from its stack, it grows another eye just as good. 
Cut a leg from a crayfish, it grows another leg. Cut a finger 
off the human hand; no finger grows on. But our hair keeps 
on growing; it may grow even after the last heartbeat. Cut 
a nerve fiber of a finger; the fiber “dies” from the point 
where cut to the end of the finger and so paralyzes that end 
of the finger. But the live end begins to grow again and 
finally reaches the end of the finger. Even though the finger 
had been mangled, the nerve finds its way, if it has to go 
around bone and muscle. At the end of its journey it stops 
growing; the finger is no longer paralyzed. 

In 1907 Leo Loeb informed the world that he was growing 
frog nerve in a glass jar. Biologists began to grow pieces of 
tissue from other animals in glass jars. ‘Wilson chopped up 
a sponge and squeezed the pieces through close-woven cloth 
to separate its cells. He “cultivated” one cell; it grew into 
a whole sponge. Carrel cultivates all sorts of adult tissue 
in glass jars; even cancer cells. He has cancer cells that 
have outlived several hosts. He cut a piece from the embryo 
of a chick; after nine years it was still alive and growing. 
He cut muscle cells from a chick embryo’s heart; they grow 
and beat. 

That opened the coffin again. Tissues cut from living 
bodies, it was thought, should not grow, they should die! 
They are not germ-cells, they are only body or soma-cells. 
Soma cells were not supposed to be endowed with immor- 
tality. Yet under cultivation they live, they multiply, they 
grow. In a jar. 

Soma cells also are potentially immortal! 

Then why do they die? Why is our saliva full of dead 
cells and the skin of our body covered with dead cells? Why 
is the body that was living now dead? 

298 


a ng ge ~~ gh QoS 6 es Oe SE 


‘ 
4 
‘ 
4 
\j 
Me 
: 
$ 





THE ENDOCRINE GLANDS AND THE CAUSES OF DEATH 


What is death? No one yet knows. No one knows what 
life is. We only know the living from the dead. We know 
more about the causes of death than we did. But are we 
checking disease, postponing death? Can we renew our 
youth? Are we about to make death merely an accident? 
Can we synthesize life? Man by nature is not too modest, 
nor by training without hope or the habit of stretching his 
imagination. Our answer, then, is, “Yes, why not?” And 
a pleasant time is had by all. Molasses catches more flies 
than vinegar. 

Such important functions of our body as heartbeat, breath- 
ing, digestion, and absorption are beyond the control of our 
wills; they have their own centers or systems of control. We 
do not even yet know where all these centers and systems 
of control are located. | 

When we know just what takes place when a sweet becomes 
a sour, or how a cell converts sugar into glycogen, or why 
a heart beats in a certain solution and stops dead if the 
acidity of that solution is increased by one billionth part, we 
can begin to talk about prolonging life. 

Not one single process that goes on in any one cell of our 
body has yet been completely analyzed. When some of the 
processes of life have been even fairly well analyzed, it will 
be possible to speak of the artificial synthesis of life. 

Nevertheless, there is every reason to believe that we may 
look forward to a greatly increased control over evolutionary 
processes. Why not? Think of the already enormously 
increased ability to control growth in living organisms. This 
control has only come with an understanding of the nature 
of the stuff of organisms in which energy is transformed, and 
of the relation of organisms to the external world. With 
wider understanding will come wider control. But progress 
must be slow, because, as Child warns us, we deal with 
internal conditions which are the result of millions of years 
of alternating change. | 

It is all so new. There are to-day a half-dozen flourishing 

259 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


sciences devoted to the study of life where a few years ago 
there was not one. For the first time in human history man 
has trained his new-found instruments of precision on newly 
conceived problems. He can at last ask questions about 
himself and about life in general. Direct questioning has 
replaced vague and childish speculation. Problems have 
been formulated and solved. And every problem solved has 
opened wider vistas—and more problems. But no problem 
was ever solved by propaganda. Nor is disease checked by 
mere optimism—though digestion can be checked by a bill 
collector and a mouse’s heartbeat increased from 175 to 600 
per minute by a mouse trap. 

The death rate is declining; it has been declining for 
centuries. Men born to-day can expect longer life than men 
born twenty, fifty, five hundred, or five thousand years ago. 
Why this is so is not at all well understood. The decline in 
death rate in modern times is as true of “backward” countries 
as it is of Germany, England, the United States. The drop 
is also as true of the non-preventable diseases as of those 
which are supposed to be subject to control. 

The part that health officers, etc., play in this decline is 
uncertain. War has been increasingly waged against tuber- 
culosis for nearly a century; the tuberculosis rate has dropped 
less than that for diphtheria, croup, typhoid, and dysentery. 

The cause of many diseases is yet unknown, of others only 
partially surmised. Man responds to his environment, as 
does all life; but he is changing’ his environment, in places at 
an extraordinarily rapid rate. What is the result or what 
will be the result of these changes ts not yet known, nor can it 
be predicted with any degree of certainty. 

We hand public health, as we do government, over to’a 
power which we expect thereafter to run of its own accord. 
But neither ever gets very far ahead of the load it is supposed 
to carry. Meanwhile, for every one that knows what to eat 
and why, there are a hundred who eat for their tongue’s sake 
and let it go at that, not knowing that a double chin may be 

260 


‘ 
j 
| 
x 
i 
i 





ee ae ee 





THE ENDOCRINE GLANDS AND THE CAUSES OF DEATH 


a misdemeanor or that arteries and nerves may be as easily 
choked in fat as a cat with butter. Many use their body as 
a clothes horse and are only concerned with the parts that 
show. 

Startling facts come from physiological laboratories. They 
force us to revise our conceptions of life and death, of youth 
and old age. All protoplasm is potentially immortal. Man 
is protoplasm. Hence . . . But Man is highly complex pro- 
toplasm—an organism of infinite complexity, of tissues and 
organs and systems greatly differentiated, some more, some 
less. This mass of protoplasm functions, lives, because these 
parts work together for a common end. They are marvel- 
ously balanced. Upset the balance: disease; if the balance 
cannot be restored, the machine is broken. A few minor parts 
may be restored; a few may be dispensed with. The machine 
breaks when a vital part breaks. It never runs again. 

Isolate the liver or one brain cell and study it a lifetime: 
liver as function and cell as behavior are as meaningless and 
as lifeless as a last year’s bird nest. The parts of the human 
body are méaningless in and by themselves. Put some cells 
in a glass jar and watch them grow. Where does this land 
us? Those cells are immortal—in “proper medium.” 

Each of the billions of cells in the human body must also 
be kept in proper medium. Those cells themselves are the 
medium. On their own shoulders rests the burden of keeping 
that medium proper; they and they alone can right the 
machine, they and they alone know the levers. If they can- 
not reverse, there comes a crash. The machine is broken. 

Nothing yet has come from the laboratory to give us hope 
that the crash is not inevitable. All vital processes are re- 
versible; they must be. To live is to keep making compen- 
sations: changes, backward and forward. Simple organisms 
have it in themselves to make these compensations; they have 
their dynamic equilibrium in their own hands, as it were. 

Man does not: it is the price he pays for hands. Hands 
wear out. Even brain cells. We cannot grow new hands 

261 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


or new brains. They grow up together, though of different 
heritage, the brain being far more ancient, hence more en- 
during. They live together: a pin-prick on the finger may 
be the death of the hrain. 

The break may come from within, or from without, or from 
any one of a vast number of causes. Three out, all out. So 
in the game of life. The number of our outs—or innings— 
is set in our inheritance and buried from sight in the complex 
mechanism which is ours for a while. We can burn it up or 
jolly it along. But beyond a certain point there seems to 
come a limit to its mileage. The machine wears out because 
it is that kind of a machine. It dies because sooner or later 
the Marksman of Death strikes a vital spot. 

Pearson in his Chances of Death pictures a Bridge of Life 
across which is a trickle of humanity. They are under the 
fire of the five Marksmen, one for each Age. They fire with 
different weapons, speeds, and degrees of precision. The 
first Marksman concentrates a deadly fire upon Infancy— 
before as well as after birth; “beating down young lives with 
the bones of their ancestors.” The second Marksman aims 
a machine-gun at Childhood; his fire is concentrated, the 
loss is less appalling. The third shoots at Youth with a bow 
and arrow; there is no great loss. The fourth fires slowly at 
Maturity with a blunderbuss; his hits are scattered. The 
fifth Marksman of Death is a sharpshooter; no one can escape 


the Death of Senility. 


262 


Le eg 


re 


ee ee 


Se Se ee a a 








CHAPTER V 


THE INTEGRATING ORGAN AND MECHANISM OF ADJUSTMENT 


1. The Old and the New Psychology. 2. The Impulse to Live. 3. Samples 
of Low Life Behavior. 4. The Animal “Mind.” 5. The Excitability of Living 
Matter. 6. The Nature of the Reflex Arc. 7. The “All-or-None” Conductors. 
8. Reflex Action. 9. The Nature of Nerves. 10. The World as Stimulus. 
Il. Receptors of Sights and Sounds. 12. Receptors of Chemical Stimuli. 
13. Visceral and Kinesthetic Receptors. 14. The Nervous System. 15. The 
Lower Centers of the Nervous System. 16. The Supreme Adjustor. 17. The 
Pictured Movements of the Brain. 18. The Conditioned Reflex. 19. The 
Autonomic Nervous System. 20. Cramps and Fatigue. 2]. Mind and 
Consciousness. . 


7 


OF all the ’ologies I studied in school, the one that gave me 
the least light on man and myself was psychology—excepting, 
possibly, mineralogy. It worried me: I wanted to learn about 
my own and man’s psyche, and did not. I assumed it was 
because the course was over my head. It was. 

For this reason. To the old psychology heads were like 
crystals. By gazing into them, called “introspection,” the 
mind could be seen and studied. Crystal-gazing never did 
call itself a science; mind-gazing did, but is now also only a 
cult. The introspectors could not agree as to what they saw. 
But that they were looking at “mind” they had no doubt. 
Their logic was simple and convincing: mind is not matter, 
the body is matter; mind and body, therefore, are separate 
and distinct entities. They turned the body over to sawbones 
and kept “mind” for themselves and went on arguing about 
what they saw in it. 

“T see red,” says one. “Is it pure?” asks another; “‘is it 
perception, sensation, connotation, or ideation; or is it a 

263 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


conception, or the imagination? Is it as content, awareness, 
or as ego? If as ego, can you time it; if as awareness, can 
you weigh it?” This is all nonsense, of course; but not more 
so than the psychology I studied in school. 

The net result of introspection was a Noah’s Ark of stalls 
each labeled for an occupant, a “content of the mind.” It 
was not unlike the shaved-head phrenology charts with allotted 
areas for bumps of amativeness, adhesiveness, philoprogeni- 
tiveness, and other faculties. Phrenology broke down before 
the fact that my bump of “amativeness” may be due to a 
thick skull, water beneath the skull, or the fact that with no 
bump at all I am very amative. 

The old psychology went the same way. Mind was found 
to be neither a “‘secretion of the brain” as bile is of the liver, 
nor any thing or process apart from a living body. It was 
next discovered that the brain itself is simply a part of the 
central nervous system, the body’s integrating organ or 
mechanism of adjustment. That this mechanism is born 
primed for many primitive naked-and-unashamed activities, 
but is unlearned in modern ways and learns only by expe- 
rience, was the next step in the downfall of the old psy- 
chology. 

With the realization that some individuals have no mind at 
all, individual behavior began to be a problem. With the 
realization that the outstanding fact of evolution is individual 
variation, and that the significant fact of the genus Homo is 
individual behavior, and that stereotyped behavior in an in- 
dividual is a sign of abnormality and if vicious lands him 
in a padded cell, the old science of mind-gazing lost its pep 
and the gazers began to try to find out what happens to human 
beings and why. And that is a real problem, from the com- 
plete solution of which we are yet miles and years. 

To solve a problem is to know its laws. To know the laws 
is to be able to make predictions. For example: I can pre- 
dict the behavior of a pint of ethyl-alcohol under many physi- 
cal and chemical changes so accurately that you can expect 

264 





THE MECHANISM OF ADJUSTMENT 


your pint of C2HsOH to behave the same way under the same 
conditions. That is science. I cannot predict your behavior 
when you drink that pint of alcohol—the personal equation 
is too big. 

Sciences are exact to the extent that the personal equation 
is eliminated. The personal equation can never be eliminated 
in predicting human behavior. 

General predictions, yes. Cats are cats, dogs are dogs, 
pigs are pigs. No two alike, but enough alike for practical 
purposes. Can you predict any certain tomcat’s behavior 
an hour hence? You cannot even predict next week’s weather. 
A three-year-old child contains more elements than the 
weather and is driven by more forces. Can you predict its 
behavior? The particular behavior of any one human being 
under any one certain condition may depend on an infinitesi- 
mal amount of a hormone yet unknown to science. Give up? 
No; look into hormones, into individual inheritance, into mil- 
lions of reflexes many of which may be put out of action by 
the wink of an eye. What is the nature of hormones, what is 
it that is inherited, how are reflexes conditioned and acquired, 
how are they put out of action, why can a wink be so devas- 
tating? 

Man both makes and outlaws his own laws. He cuts off 
his nose to spite his face; dies to live and makes a martyr of 
himself in the name of custom; scarifies his face and body, 
deforms his head, waist, and feet, and wears sackcloth and 
ashes, patent-leather shoes, and plug hats in the name of 
fashion; and consigns to hell his infants’ souls in the name of 
the Saviour he implores to save his own soul. 

The vagaries of human behavior seem as countless as the 
sands of the sea; but the sands can be classified and described. 
Human behavior also, though the problem is more complex 
and shifting. That man makes an ass of himself and elects 
himself a saint only adds zest to the study of human behavior. 
Man is not only the most curious thing in the world, but the 

265 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


most interesting, not only to live with, but as an object of 
observation. 

The old psychology died hard; it has not been easy to give 
up mental faculties. But in surrendering mind to philosophy 
we have gained living human beings; in abandoning the 
search for some magic power to transform human nature we 
have discovered how to transmute “imps into angels by the 
alchemy of smiles.” 

Not that we are born imps, but helpless infants with a 
specific nature called human and a definite equipment for 
learning human and inhuman behavior. This inheritance 
makes up the raw materials of the new psychology. What is 
its nature, how is it modified by nurture? These two problems 
resolved, the new psychology can begin to formulate the laws 
and principles which govern human reactions, in individuals, 
in groups, in nations. When that time comes—and it will— 
it will be possible so to organize human affairs and human 
society that the innate love for life can find satisfaction in 
loyalty to ideals and service to humanity. 


Z 


Everything cuts up or behaves: electrons, atoms, ions, mole- - 
cules, water, gunpowder, living beings, everything. We can 
know things only by their behavior. Living things have their 
own modes or ways of behavior; there are certain criteria of 
livingness. Among these criteria is growth in a complex dy- 
namic protoplasmic mechanism. Such a mechanism cannot 
grow without energy. This energy comes primarily from 
the sun; the earth itself is the source of the protoplasm. 

The living organism thereby called to life came at last to 
be born of woman. From the beginning of its individual ex- 
istence as a fertilized ovum until senile decay and death 
exhaust its inherited potentialities and complete its living 
cycle, it never stops growing, although it does stop growing 
larger. This growth or change of body during the life cycle 

266 








THE MECHANISM OF ADJUSTMENT 


is one aspect of human life: genetic behavior or morphology. 

During life certain vital processes take place in glands and 
organs of digestion, circulation, respiration, etc., whereby 
the growth of the body is regulated and the individual is 
maintained in health. This is visceral behavior. 

The third aspect of behavior includes the responses where: 
by the individual is adjusted to the outside world. These 
responses are generally made with the motor mechanism of 
the body and involve locomotion or speech, and hence are 
called somatic behavior, or psychology. 

But note that all forms of behavior of all living things 
have a common origin, spring from a common root, and obey 
the same fundamental laws of life. Hence every phase of 
human behavior is but part of the problem of life in general 
—and every problem of life involves all of life and the 
environment of life. The uniqueness of life is the way living 
beings respond to vital stimuli, thereby so adjusting them- 
selves that they continue their existence as living beings. 
Therein lies the uniqueness of life. To say, with Herbert 
Spencer, that life corresponds with environment is, as Herrick 
points out, to advance life no further than a self-registering 
thermometer. The thermometer reacts to an outside stimulus; 
the stimulus is an impinging energy. But life not only wars 
against disintegrating agents, “it captures the attacking forces, 
appropriates their base of supplies, and compels the hostile 
phalanx actually to turn about and fight the battles of the tri- 
umphant organism.” 

Why this unique behavior of living things? It is their 
nature; that kind of behavior is inherent in living protoplasm. 
Because of its nature, it adjusts itself to its environment. 
It eats, it excretes; it derives energy from food, it is driven 
by energies which impinge upon its body. Some of that 
energy is dissipated in heat and in energy-consuming activities 
inside its body; some of that energy is stored within its body; 
some of that energy is expended in waiting for or going after 

267 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


more energy. These are all vital processes and consume 
energy for vital adjustments. 

“Vital” is a useful word and cloaks much that is yet in- 
scrutable. But the energy with which you hold this book is 
but the energy of your impinging environment so combined 
with the energy within you—orginally won from nature by 
plants—and so transformed in you into such a high potential 
current that it can be made to do such work as human 
machines are by their nature and training impelled to do. 

Living impulses, vital adjustments; the call to live, the 
response to the call; the living being as an individual; the 
reactions of the individual living human being: these matters 
are now our concern. But again let it be said that any 
psycho-analysis which neglects the facts of genetic and vis- 
ceral behavior will never discover the materials with which 
to synthesize a human being. Human psychology is rooted in 
living human protoplasm and can be explained only in terms 
of its antecedent history. 


3 


The pyschology of bacteria is not well known because they 
have only recently been discovered. But the lowest-lived 
bacteria known to the microscope make distinctions that 
baffle the biochemists who study them. They have an astound- 
ing capacity to transform energy and they are sensitive to 
extraordinarily minute stimuli. Their behavior can only be 
described in physico-chemical terms. 

Some bacteria produce light. Do they burn luciferin? 
Do they use the enzyme luciferase as catalyzer? Fireflies do, 
and have special organs for its manufacture. These organs 
are controlled by nerves and respond to certain stimuli; and 
they all light up at once! Firefly behavior can be talked about 
in psychologic terms, but such terms tell us nothing of the life- 
light of the light-producing bacteria that cause decaying wood 
and flesh to glow. The psyche of bacteria is physics. 

268 


- : a . 
i Fae a ek Pe a es a aed 


SS ee ee ee ree Pee eee 
ee et ee aad 








‘THE MECHANISM OF ADJUSTMENT 


Animals are fond of sugar. There are hundreds of sugars; 
some are so much alike that man cannot tell which is which 
Bacteria can. They can detect a thousandth part of 1 pea 
cent of certain sugars; they prove it by their behavior. Are 
they on speaking terms with atoms? At any rate, their reac 
tions are more refined than those of the sugar chemist’s re- 
agents. And yet bacteria are so low that science has not yet 
decided that they are real cells. But they are alive; they re- 
spond to stimuli and run the gamut of adjustment behavior 
on which life depends. 

Animal adjustment generally involves locomotion. Low 
forms flow, because life is fluid. The solidity of bones, 
horns, teeth, hair, etc., is due to dead mineral matter between 
living cells, as is the “wood” of trees. White blood-cells 
flow through membrane. Certain Protozoa that live on moldy 
wood can flow through cotton mesh so fine as to strain the 
food from their body. Once through, the streams of proto: 
plasm unite again into a single body which behaves as though 
it had not been strained. By such streaming movements 
amebz and white blood-cells ingest food particles by flowing 
around them. 

A worm has been seen under the microscope to swim 
through the protoplasm of a frog’s muscle, the protoplasm 
closing behind the worm. At one point the frog’s muscle 
had been injured—it was “dead”; the worm could not swim 
through that, it went around it as though it were a stone. 

Because of this fluidity, living protoplasm can respond. 
Without fluidity, muscles could make no response. Cutting 
a nerve paralyzes a muscle but does not kill it, though disuse 
will cause it to waste away. Every living muscle-cell can 
respond to stimulus. 

The microscopic cilia lining our windpipe move in defi- 
nite rhythmic sequence, wave after wave, like a field of wav- 
ing grain. A speck of dust excites them to move; the larger 
the speck, the faster they move. Cilia are ancient structures, 
the sole motor mechanism of many micro-organisms. Could 

269 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


we get as much work out of our motor apparatus as the little 
paramecium does with its cilia, we could lift 1,500 pounds. 
Cilia cut from a frog’s throat keep right on moving; they 
will work a weight uphill. 

Bacteria, amebz, white blood-cells, muscle-cells, ciliated 
cells, are all types of behavior, samples of life’s adjustments 
to livable conditions. Every living cell and every living or- 
ganism, from yeast to man, has its own reaction system, its 
own type of behavior; its own psyche—if you like that word. 


4 


Washburn’s Animal Mind, second edition, lists 841 titles 
consulted in the preparation of her book. That was eight 
years ago. The next edition will probably list a thousand 
titles; shall we know more then about the “mind” of animals? 

Can the mind be seen? Why not. We “see” metabolism, 
and know much of the processes of chemical exchange be- 
tween living organisms and their environment. We call these 
exchanges physiological processes; and while there are many 
that are only partly understood, and many that are as yet 
only partially guessed at, no one speaks of physiological 
processes with furrowed brow, unless, indeed, the process 
at the time is functioning badly. But “mind” suggests mys- 
teries, vague realms in which souls converse with souls and 
_ psychic phenomena defy every known or conceivable law of 
matter and energy. 

Mind is not matter; neither is the attraction of the positive 
half of the magnet for molecules of potassium and sodium, 
matter. But the attraction of an anode for potassium and 
iron filings is a relation between matter. Certain elements 
are attracted by an anode, some are repelled; a youth is 
attracted by a maiden. There ihe matter is; it is open to in- 
vestigation. The “matter” may be a.wisp of hair or a down- 
cast eye. : 

Mind is like life: it is known only by the company it keeps, 

270 





i Se RR i let Se a 





_ 


THE MECHANISM OF ADJUSTMENT 


living organisms; they are real. There are criteria for liv- 
ingness. They often fail. An organism may show no signs 
of life: as an opossum, or a grain of wheat. Is it alive? 
Only by applying certain stimuli can we tell. If it makes no 
response, it is dead. “Certain stimuli”: what? Stimuli known 
to be harmful to opossum or vital for wheat germs. 

The live grain germinates under proper stimuli. Its be- 
havior can be observed and described in terms of energy and 
matter, and in its behavior will be found no contradiction to 
the laws of physics and chemistry. That germinating grain 
shows behavior; it has no mind, of course? Plant physiolo- 
gists are not so certain; some are quite certain that if an 
ameba has a “mind,” a grain of wheat has. 

Has the ameba a mind? But, first, what is mind: con- 
sciousness? reason? intelligence? intellectual faculties? Or 
all these combined? I may think I know what is on my mind 
and what my mind is. How can I know your mind? I look 
at a picture: I know what I see; I know the emotions, mem- 
ories, etc., the picture rouses in me. I cannot know what that 
picture is to you except by your behavior: words, actions, etc. 
Even then I must interpret your behavior in terms of my 
own experience. There may be nothing in my experience 
which gives me a clue to your behavior. 

When Washburn says that we know that consciousness— 
‘fas evidence of mind’’—resides in ourselves, that it undoubt- 
edly exists in animals with structures resembling ours, and 
that “‘beyond this point, for all we know, it may exist in 
simpler and simpler forms until we reach the very lowest of 
living beings,” I do not see that she has moved either forward 
or backward. To say even that mind is a quality of living- 
ness, a sign of life—as is oxidation a sign of metabolism— 
is probably quite as futile. To say that one ameba engulf- 
ing another is a sign of hunger, a spitfire cat with an arched 
back and slashing tail a sign of anger, a dog with a can tied 
to its tail yelping dcewn the street a sign of fear, and a strutting 

2/1 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


cock a sign of amorousness, is to anthropomorphize animal 
behavior. 

Mental states, yes; we have names for dozens of them. I 
know how I feel when I am kicked and I have names for my 
feelings. I do not know how a kicked dog feels. I can 
judge only by his behavior. He might wag his tail and appear 
to like it. I could then only understand his behavior by know- 
ing his history: the kick might be an invitation to a fox-hunt. 

Mind, like life itself, is quantitative. I stretch my arms, a 
button pops off my vest. I decide to change my tailor, or 
reduce, or have the button sewed on in the morning, or sew it 
on myself. I do nothing. Another button pops. Now what? 

The ameba has no buttons to worry about. Sound and 
sight of buttons never enter its mind. The stimuli which 
beat upon it from the time it is pried or kicked loose from 
another ameba until it loses its own identity by dividing into 
two amebe are not such as beat upon the near-by frog that 
is now calling its mate. 

We cannot know how the world looks to the ameba. But 
we can put questions to it: what do you think of red ink— 
do you like it, can you digest it, do you want more? How 
does it feel to be turned loose in a drop of water, with nothing 
to stand on or hang to? Such questions are put to amebe and 
to other living creatures. These questions are in terms of 
physical and chemical change in environment. By their 
behavior under changed Sout inferences are drawn as 
to their mind. 

But the ameba’s mind must be of a different quantity from 
ours. We “smell” and “taste” food. Can it distinguish 
brickdust from protoplasmic dust by smell and taste? It can 
make the distinction—and does, without visible structure of 
taste or olfactory organs. 

By its behavior we know that the ameba distinguishes and 
that in certain ways it makes finer discriminations than we 
do. Whatever its senses, we can only say they are appro- 
priate to its needs. 

212 





THE MECHANISM OF ADJUSTMENT 


When Jennings says that the ameba “‘reacts to all classes of 
stimuli to which higher animals react,” he simply bears 
testimony to an inherent criterion of living organisms: a 
certain kind of reaction system. By that system they main- 
tain a certain dynamic equilibrium and thereby adjust them- 
selves to stimuli destructive of and favorable to life. If 
that system fails, they lose their minds—as does a drop of 
water when an electric current passes through it. 

In other words, it is time to give the mind a rest. The 
loose use of the word has probably done more to befog think- 
ing than any other word, except possibly “unconscious.” It 
means so much it means nothing. By using it in connection 
with animal behavior it implies some transcendental mystery 
in living organisms. There is much ignorance among human 
beings as to the nature of human beings—so much, in fact, 
that it borders on the mysterious; but the mystery of a sand 
dune, of a snow crystal, of a flash of lightning, and of an 
ameba’s response to a lump of sugar or a bull’s to a red rag, 
is all of the same order. To identify mind with protoplasm 
or with nervous action is to talk about a hole in the ether or 
disembodied spirits. This is not a static world, and matter 
will cut up as long as the sun shines. When matter is as 
complex and has had as much experience as has the stuff of 
which we are made, it seems inevitable that it should have 
a vast capacity to vary its behavior in response to the situa- 
tion in which it finds itself. It can do this because it is irri- 
table. When it can no longer get excited about certain things, 
it is finished as protoplasm. If you still insist on mind, call 
it a manifestation of the kind of excitability that inheres in 
all dynamically active protein compounds called living 
beings. 

Meanwhile, we shall do well to recognize, with Herrick, 
that the real problems of human psychology are still over our 
head and that the problems of animal psychology are pro- 
portionately difficult as their sensori-motor organization 
differs from ours. “The popular dramatization of animal 

273 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


life and imputation to them of human thoughts and feelings 
may have a certain justification for literary or pedagogic 
purposes, the same as other fairy stories. But let it not be 
forgotten that this is fiction for children, not science nor the 
foundation of science.” 


os) 


The microscope reveals no nerves in the ameba. But the 
ameba has curiosity: it explores its world, even though that 
world is less than a drop of water. The ameba is an individ- 
ual, as was Socrates, or as you and I are. Socrates was 
condemned to death for corrupting the morals of the youth! 
He had irritated some of the best minds. 

All life is irritable. This irritability inheres in every liv- 
ing cell of every living body. Because of that quality the 
ameba is excited to explore its world and man his. That 
quality leads to the ego in the individual and to culture in 
the human race. 

The enemies of Socrates were so excited that they put him 
to death. Hunger can so excite an ameba that it commits 
cannibalism. Moisture and heat so excite a grain of wheat 
that it sprouts; if it does not respond to sprouting stimuli, it 
is dead. An ameba beyond the stage of excitability is dead. 

Irritability is in the nature of living things, regardless of 
size and shape, whether plant or animal, one-celled or many- 
celled, and of every cell in every living body. Because of this 
irritability, life responds. An ameba responds to hunger 
by pursuit and capture. These actions are responses, reac- 
tions. My response to fried chicken may be a smile, mouth 
water, and activity in the mastication mechanism. My re- 
sponse to fried chicken half an hour later may be a sickly 
grin; I do not want to think of food. The ameba acts the 
same way after a hearty meal. 

Without excitability there could be no response to physical 
or chemical change in environment. Any change in the en- 

| 274 





THE MECHANISM OF ADJUSTMENT 


vironment which causes excitation is a stimulus. Environ- 
ment is a big word and covers all outdoors and all our insides, 
including toothache and an idle thought; the kind and degree 
of change which serves as stimulus depend on the organism. 
Man’s is infinitely complex because he can store experience 
and vary or delay reactions and because he can respond with 
words as well as with more overt action. 

A baby cries in the next room; my response to that stimulus 
may be words, or a bottle, or any one of many possible re- 
sponses. The response I make will depend on a lifetime’s 
accumulation of stimuli and reactions. 

Our brain itself and our wonderful special sense organs 
are rooted in the nature of living things to maintain their 
dynamic equilibrium by appropriate reactions to vital stimuli. 
When we cannot do this, we are dead as a door nail. 

Nails react to chemical and physical change, but their re- 
actions are because of the elements in them and not because 
they are nails. Iron may enter the ameba’s soul; its reaction 
is not that of elements to elements, but as a complex reaction- 
system. With that it can respond by appropriate action to 
such stimuli as would leave the nail unchanged for a million 
years, or flee from an acid that would dissolve the nail in a 
few moments. The nail is irritable; but there is no sign of 
organization in its responses. Nor can it reproduce itself, 
nor perform the functions of metabolism, nor go in out of the 
rain. It cannot adjust itself to its environment; life can, be- 
cause it has an adjusting mechanism. 

Living protoplasm has the power of adjustment. Our 
nervous system is our visible mechanism of adjustment. It 
is new in life, as are skeleton and intestine; but new only as 
a new contrivance for doing something that has been done 
throughout life. The automobile is a new contrivance for 
getting about, but living organisms got about before there 
were automobiles—or legs, or wings, or fins; and adjusted 
themselves to their environment before there were nerves or 
intestines. 

275 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


The microscope shows no behavior mechanism in an egg- 
cell. But a pin-prick in the membrane of that cell causes it 
to vary its behavior: it dies. That same pin-prick in another 
egg-cell may start it on a road which ends with a frog. Is 
this “behavior” or “metabolism,” psychology or physiology? 
Once it would have been called black magic, and Loeb, the 
man who did it, would have been hanged—or made high 
priest. 

To-day the man who describes one ameba chasing another 
calls himself a psychologist; the man who describes what 
happens to the ameba that is caught calls himself a physiolo- 
gist. Yet chase and digestion are two aspects of the same 
problem: why protoplasm and man go to war. In other 
words the fundamental difference between physiology and 
psychology is precisely nil. 

In chase and digestion the ameba reacted, behaved. It 
moved: it has power of locomotion. Its movements were 
purposive. It persisted. It tried and tried again. And does 
other tricks which are black magic unless we assume that the 
lowly ameba is in all essential respects organized for life. 
It is the inherent character of excitability that comes at last to 
be expressed in nerves. Nerves are late in life, excitability 
began with life. 

A flea bites an elephant’s tail. The flea-bite is a stimulus. 
The stimulus excites—what? The tail? No; the elephant. 
The elephant is annoyed and decides to lash its tail to shake 
the flea off. The fact that the stimulus led to action implies 
more than mere irritability. The stimulus was transmitted 
across many feet of elephant body. That implies a conduction 
system. 

The ameba is not so large. The space a stimulus must 
traverse across its body is measured with a microscope. But 
the stimulus is conducted across its body as it is the length of 
the elephant’s body. Protoplasm is so organized that an ex- 
citing stimulus can be transmitted throughout its body. It 

276 





THE MECHANISM OF ADJUSTMENT 


responds as an individual and thereby adjusts itself to its 
environment. 

It is the excitation-conduction system of living organisms 
which makes adjustment possible. That system began with 
the lowest form of life, it is as old as life itself. It grew more 
complex as the organism became more complex. It led finally 
to special organs for receiving stimuli, special wires for con- 
ducting stimuli, and special motor machinery for reactions 
according to the needs of the organism as a whole for ad- 
justment. 

Excitation, as Child points out, is the great energy-liberat- 
ing process; it leads to faster living. In conduction, excita- 
tion passes from one region to another. The dynamic change 
in the excited region is the exciting factor in the adjoining 
region. But both excitation and conduction are not only inde- 
pendent of specific forms of life, but also of the nature of 
the stimulus or external factor. Which means that the 
nervous system is to be thought of in more than mere terms 
of structure. 

In fact, apart from teeth and bones, there is little or noth- 
ing in the human body that has meaning as mere structure— 
or as mere function. Structure and function are inseparable 
in living organisms. 

For more than 3,500 years anatomists studied blood vessels 
and blood—and knew next to nothing or worse than nothing 
about the marvelous river of blood which ceaselessly bathes 
the myriads of living cells of the living body. Because it 
does bathe these cells, carrying to them what every living cell 
must have (nourishment and oxygen) and relieving them 
of what every living cell must be rid of (refuse), the enor: 
mously complex bodies of Man and animals above the 
humblest are possible. The blood stream made integration 
possible in complex bodies—such complex structures could 
function as a unit; the blood made for a degree and a kind 
of individuality in a complex organism otherwise impossible. 

Now note: the blood transports chemical substances. But 

207 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


that is not enough. My feet may be ever so bountifully sup- 
plied with blood and my transportation system may be doing 
its work perfectly. But suppose I have stepped on a tack or 
want to tell my feet to get a move on: how can my foot 
tell me about the tack or how can I tell my feet to move 
faster? Here is where the nervous system comes in as Co- 
partner with the blood as an integrating mechanism. 

The blood carries matter; what do the nerves carry—elec- 
trons, charges of electricity? Possibly. At any rate, all liv- 
ing protoplasm is irritable and presumably electrically sen- 
sitive. Whatever it is that nerves carry, there is no doubt 
as to results: physiological influences, excitatory or inhibi- 
tory, are transmitted. With nerves, quick action at a distance 
is possible; a complex mechanism is knit into one going con- 
cern. ‘The nervous system is the great integrating and co- 
ordinating organ. By specializing in conduction it makes 
possible quick action in distant members, widely scattered 
regions, multifarious organs, and diverse tissues; the entire 
organism can thereby adjust as an individual. 

There is nothing simple about our nervous system, nor even 
of any one of its billions of component cells, but as long as we 
keep in mind its nature we can make progress in under- 
standing it—and that is a long step toward understanding pa, 
ma, and the baby. 


6 


A ray of sunlight through a hole in an awning strikes me 
on the brow; I do not sense it. A moment later the same 
ray strikes me in the eye; now I sense it. It is a decided 
stimulus. I respond, become dynamically active. I move my 
chair; hundreds of muscles are involved in the adjusting re- 
action. Yet if that had been a ray of tropic sun, I might 
have felt it on my brow as heat; and responded with appro- 
priate movements. My response in one case was called out 
by a stimulus to an organ (my eye), in the uther by a stimulus 

278 





THE MECHANISM OF ADJUSTMENT 


to a region (my skin); but in both responses my adjustment 
was made with reference to a new relation between myself 
and my environment. 

A light ray falling on any part of an ameba’s body is 
sensed; the animal as a whole makes appropriate response. 

There is.a difference. I was stimulated by the light ray 
only as light or only as heat. By light only when the ray 
fell on an organ specialized for light: that is, for ether vibra- 
tions of certain length. The ameba felt the ray as vibration, 
but whether as heat or as light we do not know. What is 
certain is that its entire outer surface is sensitive to ether 
vibrations. Its whole outer surface, therefore, may be said 
to be receptive. Through its “skin” it receives stimuli from 
the outside world. Its entire exterior surface is its receptor 
of stimuli. | 

Both ameba and man responded to the ether-wave stimulus. 
This implies two additional processes. First, some means of 
communication whereby the stimulus was transmitted from 
exterior (skin or eye) to the body within. In man, the means 
of communication was a nerve; the nerve was the conductor. 
There are no nerves in the ameba; yet the message was trans- 
mitted. The response in both animals was movement—ad- 
justment. This was effected in man by certain body move- 
ments; also in the ameba. In man, the movements took 
place through the mechanism of muscles and bones, activity 
in glands, etc. This mechanism cannot be discovered in the 
ameba, but by some means the body responded; the message 
was carried out. The means in both animals was the effector. 

From ameba to man is a long jump in,evolution. What 
evolved: what is back of man’s complex nervous system and 
his many complexes of behavior? Evidently some sort of 
system as old as life itself and inherent in every living being. 
This system implies excitability and transmission in general, 
and in particular, receptor, conductor, effector. Through a 
system of this pattern man and every living being make ad- 
justments to environment, 

279 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


Through evolution this system of adjustment has developed 
into certain mechanisms and methods. Man’s responses are 
not ameba’s, nor elephant’s, nor gorilla’s; the environment 
to which he must make adjustment is his own, his responses 
are his own. 

Two important points as to the nature of the nervous system 
can now be seen in bold relief: _ 

First, in spite of structural complexity the nervous system 
of man and higher animals can be conceived of in terms 
of conductors of messages from receptors to effectors. The 
three make up the reflex arc. The arc itself is not seen as 
structure in low organisms—but they react as though the 
arc were present. In other words, the reflex arc is something 
new as visible structure in evolution; the dynamic action 
performed by the reflex arc inheres in ameba, hen’s egg, 
muscle cell, every living thing. 

Second, the receptors in man’s earliest ancestors were on 
the external surface. Where else should we expect to find 
them? Life adjusts to externals; it must be so organized that 
it can keep in touch with externals. Man’s receptors are on 
or in his skin, or begin their embryological development, as 
does his entire nervous system, from the outer germ-layer. 
Temperature and tactile receptors are pure skin structures, 
and as compared with such special sense organs as eye, ear, 
and nose, are in some respects more primitive than those of 
any other warm-blooded animal. But all receptors are so 
located as to be exposed to the action of environment change. 

As the entire outer surface of the ameba is sensitive, so 
man’s entire outer germ-layer is potentially nervous. But 
the nervous system itself as it exists in man is simply the 
final product of the evolution of the excitability-transmission 
relation of living protoplasm. Its complexity in man— 


especially of brain cortex—is a measure of his capacity to 


escape the limitations of behavior set by the reflex arc. He 
can refer his reactions to a higher court. But even reactions 
| 280 





THE MECHANISM OF ADJUSTMENT 


in this higher court are based fundamentally on reflex arc 
units. The reflex arc is the basis of all human behavior. 

While the conception of a reflex arc in which response fol- 
lows stimulus as does the ringing of a bell the pushing of a 
button, is valuable, it must be understood that the simple 
reflex is a “convenient abstraction,” as Herrick calls it. It 
is no master key to unlock the secrets of the brain. In actual 
fact, “each reflex center is usually a region where more or 
less complex compounding of simple reflexes is effected, 
where a single afferent impulse is distributed to all the 
muscles necessary for the complex motor response, where an- 
tagonistic impulses meet and struggle for possession of a 
final common path, or some other correlation of Inia order 
is effected.” 

All this does not, of course, diminish the oe of the 
concept of the arc as the mechanism for immediate response 
in unit behavior. This unit, says Herrick, involves the follow- 
. ing processes: stimulus (some physical agent impinging upon 
excitable protoplasm) ; excitation (effect of the stimulus upon 
some receptive apparatus) ; afferent transmission to a center 
of correlation; central adjustment (whereby the afferent im- 
pulse is transferred to an efferent pathway); efferent trans- 
mission (to some specific peripheral or end organ of re- 
sponse) ; response (in some specific effector—muscle, gland, 
etc.). 

The possible permutations of reflex arcs which form the 
bases of human behavior reach staggering figures, unnum- 
bered billions. Therein rests man’s capacity to learn to do 
new things, to react to situations not predetermined by his 
inherited structure. 


7 


Living beings as transformers of energy give us the clue 
to the second great step in evolution and an insight into the 
nature of nerves; and thereby a better understanding of the 
life of man. 

281 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


The transformation of energy is a dynamic process. It 
implies motion, movement. Movement implies force, power. 
Living beings are power plants generating energy for home 
consumption. They must be, because living beings must have 
something to live on, raw materials to be built into living 
bodies. These materials exist outside the body. They must 
be captured from the outer environment and brought within 
the body cavity. Within, they are inspected; what can be 
used is used; the refuse is then ejected. These physiological 
processes are purely material (chemical) exchange. Life 
trades with the world of environment and in death balances 
the account. 

This material relation of living beings to environment is 
only possible because life is dynamically related to environ- 
ment. Living beings are so constituted that environment so 
acts on them that they react. The more complicated the 
organism, the higher the rate of dynamic action. 

This is beautifully illustrated in the respiration rate in the 
human brain. The cortex or gray matter is the region of 
highest activity; it consumes twice the oxygen and liberates 
one and one-half times the carbon dioxide the white matter 
of the brain does. Measured by oxygen consumed and car- 
bon dioxide produced, the dynamic activity of the cerebrum 
is greater than that of the cerebellum. And so on, down 
through the various regions of the brain to spinal cord, which — 
has the lowest rate of all. 

Material exchange in one-celled organisms is effected 
through the exterior surface. This naturally limits the size of 
the organism, both for growth or material relations to en- 
vironment and for change or dynamic relations. Hence the 
energy requirement of living organisms varies according to 
surface area rather than to volume of body. A dog trans- 
forms more energy relatively than an elephant; a baby needs 
more energy relatively than its father. 

Why “naturally”? Because, as we have already seen, any 
increase in size causes volume to increase faster than surface. 

282 





THE MECHANISM OF ADJUSTMENT 


The combined surface area of one billion amebe is six hun- 
dred thousand times greater than that of one ameba with a 
volume equal to that of the billion individuals. Using Hux- 
ley’s metaphor, our fictitious one-billion-amebe-sized ameba 
has increased its population (volume) six hundred thousand 
times faster than it has increased its import and export 
facilities (surface area). 

Life cannot do business under such conditions. In the 
course of evolution the processes we call “living” began 
to occur in exceedingly small bits of protoplasm; these small 
bits (cells, protozoa, etc.) have remained the physico-chemical 
units of all living processes and of all living beings. 

The second great step in organic evolution occurred when 
these units were impelled by certain natural forces to pool 
their interests and thus form larger and larger co-operative 
organisms. | 

Now for the behavior, or dynamic relation, of the organism 
as a transformer of energy. A raindrop on my hand may be 
as effective a stimulus as a cloudburst to drive me to cover. 
But a slight stimulus is effective only over part of an ameba. 
The stimulus may be so slight that it “dies out” before it is 
transmitted across the ameba’s body. There is no special 
conducting path in the ameba. 

I may shout and shout in my room: no one in the office be- 
low hears me, although the man in the next room may be 
annoyed and the man in the room beyond excited. My voice, 
through a speaking tube or telephone wire, is conducted to 
the office below, or halfway round the world. 

For stimulus to carry across the body of an ameba, it must 
be of a certain intensity. The greater the distance across its 
body, the more intense must be the stimulus to traverse that 
distance. In other words, without definite paths of conduc- 
tion it must be assumed that in low organisms every stimulus 
is conducted with a loss or decrement and that stimuli of vary- 
ing quantity provoke reactions of varying quantity. 

Nerves, then, are primarily conductors, paths along which 

283 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


impulses are transmitted. They do it at a speed of about 
400 feet a second. The nature of the impulse they conduct 
is not known. Nerves can be artificially stimulated by 
mechanical, thermal, chemical, and electrical means. The 
impulse itself must be some form of energy. The conduction 
is probably electrical in nature, but presumably not like that 
of an electric current. 

Nerve fiber in man and highly organized animals conducts 
impulses on the all-or-none principle. A fly lands on an 
elephant’s tail. That landing is not an adequate stimulus; 
it does not pass the threshold. But if the fly bites the tail, 
the stimulus is adequate; it passes the lowest limit (threshold) 
which will bring about a reaction. The impulse, being suf- 
ficient to pass the threshold, is delivered as a maximal excita- 
tion and without decrement, regardless of the strength or in- 
tensity of the stimulus. 

We may, then, think of life as having moved from a one- 
cell hive into a mansion of countless cells because the outside 
world of environment excited life to wider activity. It could 
make the move only through specialization in the excitation- 
response mechanism. With man, that mechanism reached 
such perfection with all-or-none conduction and all-or-none 
muscle engines that one pistol shot could fire all civilization, 
as one small spark can fire a whole magazine of powder. 


8 


Reflex action requires no reflection; if it did, we should 
have no time to reflect. Yet they are from the same word, 
“to bend back.” In reflection, we turn the memory pages of 
a misspent career or whatever it is we are reflecting about. 
In reflexes, life itself knows how to act; we may or may not 
be conscious of the act. 

I am writing. From time to time my eyelids snap shut; 
I am not conscious of it, nor is the blinking due to conscious 
effort. My eyes blink as fast as dust or dryness stimulates 

284 


patie a 


i 
} 
' 
q 








THE MECHANISM OF ADJUSTMENT 


certain nerves to close the lids. The stimulus removed, other 
muscles open the lids. 

If the stimulus is a cinder, mere winking might not remove 
it; the lids may be drawn tighter. Meanwhile I become con- 
scious: pain has come as a stimulus. I react now. But my 
effort to overcome reflex effort may not suffice: I may have to 
use strong finger muscles to overcome the pull of less strong 
eyelid muscles. 

The eye-blink was a reflex action. It started with excitation 
in my eye due to an external stimulus. That excitation was 
conducted by a nerve to the central nervous system; from 
central by another nerve to eyelid muscles: they contracted. 
The structure or mechanism involved—receptor (eye), con- 
ductor (nerve), effector (muscle)—is a reflex arc; the action 
involved in a reflex act. On the other hand, my behavior in 
removing the cinder—perhaps involving a mirror, cotton, 
match, or a journey to a physician—was a general reaction 
and far from simple. 

The are in the eye-blink functioned as a unit; the reflex 
act performed a definite service of biologic value. And work 
of arc and result of act both transpire without my knowing 
or heeding. Only when the arc fails to work, or when the 
act fails to remove the cause of excitation, does consciousness 
take charge. 

The reflex arc, then, is an instinctive mechanism to trans- 
late impulse into action. It is the simplest unit of reaction; 
the reflex act the simplest adapted or purposive unit-response 
to an external excitation. Arc and act made higher organisms 
possible. Through them order and unity are preserved in 
highly complex forms. With the appearance of brain and 
spinal cord as central adjustor for these many arcs, the evolu- 
tion of monkeys and man was well on the way. 

Why does the eye blink—at a shadow even? Why does an 
invisible speck of dust close the eye? Or a speck of pepper 
set the lachrymal glands to secreting? Or a sudden strange 
noise touch off the whole body, including rate of heartbeat, 

285 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


change in composition of the blood, activity in a thousand 
glands? | 

What happens, how the excitation is conducted to the 
effector muscle of eyelid, lachrymal gland, etc., is generally 
fairly clear. How the stimulus excites is still a profound 
secret. How does the message get on the wire? 

At any rate, it does. And it is also in the nature of the 
wires to central that messages marked: “Answer urgent” are 
given precedence. Herein is the biologic value of the reflexes. 
The newborn babe does not have to think about food, much 
less have to learn to close its windpipe when swallowing: it 
does not even have to learn to suck—and that is a very com- 
plex process. 

Reflexes are inherited types of action; they go with the 
birthright. Some function before the doctor can say, “It’s a 
boy!”; some appear only after some hours; some, only after 
weeks. The grasping reflex is so well developed at birth that 
a normal child can support its body by grasping a broom 
handle. In a baby born without a brain this reflex persisted 
till its death at the eighteenth day. The babe can close its 
eyes from birth. The blink-reflex appears in the third month. 
It can shed tears in the fourth month. | 

Some reflexes are simple, such as the eye-blink; some, 
complex—many muscles or glands respond, as in tickling; 
some spread—different parts of or the whole body responds; 
some, periodic—the reaction is repeated, trembling, coughing, 
hiccoughing, sneezing, swallowing. 

When we are keyed up our reflexes are quick and intense— 
tonic. A “nervous” person jumps at anything. A brainless 
frog injected with a strychnine solution is very sensitive to 
reflex stimuli: the slamming of a door sets it jumping! Mental 
effort to inhibit pain intensifies the agony of human beings 
suffering cramps caused by strychnine or tetanus poisoning. 
It is like trying to go to sleep: the harder we try, the wider 
awake we are. 

Reflex action may be conditioned and habits of reaction 

286 


THE MECHANISM OF ADJUSTMENT 


developed to work like reflexes; otherwise our newborns would 
have a hard row to hoe. If we had to depend on our inherited 
reflexes and instinctive types of behavior, we should never 
be as clever as the bees and ants nor have as much intelligence 
as a capuchin monkey. 

Man’s inherited reflex action repertoire is just enough to 
keep him on the floor. A chick and a colt inherit a better 
set than that. Ours are of enormous importance and save 
us time, effort, energy. But what counts most in human be- 
havior is the manner in which they are “conditioned” and 
what kind of habits are built upon and around them. They 
arose in response to certain organic needs; too often they are 
conditioned in ignorance, superstition, selfishness, or vice; 
or in the lap of luxury as sources of amusement and family 
pride—equally useless for society. 


2 


Living protoplasm is excitable; with nerves, it is more 
easily excitable; with brains, it need not get excited and so 
can find time to go a-fishing. The nature of nerves, then, is 
to make us nervous. Therein is the real difference between 
man and tree: with nerves, the tree would be the higher life. 

The baby is a “bundle of nerves’”—and gets on mother’s. 
And grows along at the usual rate, knowing nothing of nerves. 
Then, without a second’s warning, comes a day when the 
youngster cries out, “GOT THE TOOTHACHE!” 

That means that the nerve back of that “toothache” is 
exposed to the world. That is why it cries out: exposure to 
the world is not the way nerves were brought up. Nerves 
are not accustomed to exposure, nor adapted to contact with 
outdoor environment. They are inside performers: they 
carry messages from somewhere within the body to something 
within the body. The “somewhere” may be a cell or group 
of cells on or anywhere within the body, but normally not in 
the nerve itself. 

287 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


No tooth “‘aches.” When certain cells became enamel, 
others dentine, and others cementum, and united to build a 
tooth, they traded feeling for form and surrendered most of 
their excitable heritage to become almost solid ivory. That 
is why the nerve inside the tooth gets so sore when the tooth 
gives it the air, so to speak. 

It is the nature of nerves to be extraordinarily sensitive to 
and remarkably efficient conductors of excitation. Hence the 
whole mechanism of end-receptors: shock absorbers; they 
break the news to the nerves, gently but firmly. It is the 
nerves’ business to send the news to the proper organ for 
response. If the news is startling or in code, it will be carried 
to the higher brain center for consideration or decoding. 

I go along a dusty pike in my bare feet. I cut my foot on 
a bit of glass. It does not hurt much; and if I am on my 
way to the swimming hole, I do not mind it. Who told me my 
foot was cut, or that it was not a tack I had stepped on? Per- 
haps a mile of nerve fibre and millions of nerve cells were 
involved in carrying messages before I finished with that 
cut. 

We have big nerves and little nerves, long ones and short 
ones, as we have muscles of varying length and size. The 
units are cells: in muscles, bound into sheaves; in nerves, 
bound into cables—trunk lines of communication. There 
the general resemblance ends. Nerve cells are called neurons 
—and when inflamed spell neuritis. But they are true cells; 
they have a nucleus in a mass of cytoplasm and grow and 
in general behave like ordinary cells. But they are unique 
in their astounding capacity to vary: in size and shape, 
especially in their outgrowths—“‘infinitely complicated and 
bewilderingly complex,” Child calls them. Some are as 
complex in architecture as elm trees, and are called dendrons; 
also called afferent because they carry messages toward 
central. 

Other outgrowths of neurons are called axons (axis) ; their 
branches are fewer and shorter; they are more slender and 

288 


THE MECHANISM OF ADJUSTMENT 


more uniform than dendrons, and may be three feet or more 
in length. For example, connection between the cortex of the 
brain and muscle in the calf of the leg may be made by two 
neurons: an upper motor neuron which extends to the lower 
end of the spinal cord, a lower or peripheral motor neuron 
of the sciatic nerve which ends in a muscle of the calf. Axons 
are also called efferent: they carry messages from central to 
glands, muscles, etc. Generally a neuron has only one axon; 
it may have several dendrons. 

A telephone wire can transmit messages either way. Liv- 
ing protoplasm was organized on that plan. But with neuron 
conduction paths impulses are carried only one way. The 
axon appeared first; it is more highly polarized than the den- 
dron, grows faster, is more sensitive. The dendron is more 
primitive, and perhaps plays a part in the nutrition processes 
of the parent neuron and hence is a less efficient conductor 
of messages. : 

Each neuron is a distinct entity and is visibly connected 
with no other neuron. The branches of an axon generally 
interlace into the branches of a dendron of another neuron. 
But between is a gap: the famous synapse (tying-together), 
the junction between two neurons. 

The synapse is something of a puzzler, but of great im- 
portance. If it were perfectly understood we should have a 
much clearer idea than we have now of many perplexing 
problems in human behavior. 

Nerve fibre—and muscle cells—conduct impulses without 
decrement, on the all-or-none law. At the synapse the im- 
pulse is slowed up or even blocked; or it may be speeded up. 
In any event, something happens. Slight resistance is appar- 
ently lessened by repeated excitation—hence the ease of 
action in habit formations. As though a path were worn 
smooth with frequent usage. Why? What is the synapse? 

There is no synapse in the nervous system of a jellyfish, 
nor true neurons; simply a nerve net. Harvey cut a dough- 
nut-shaped ring from the disk of a jellyfish, entrapping a 

289 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


nerve impulse. That impulse traveled around that ring for 
eleven days; 457 miles! No decrement, no slowing up of 
impulse. Apparently it might be traveling yet had not the 
muscle become fatigued and had not the impulse been inter- 
fered with by regenerating tissue. Further, in that nerve net 
impulses travel either way. 

In higher animals, a synaptic sien with highly special- 
ized neurons having numerous and intricate endings has re- 
placed the nerve net. It is a more efficient system in that 
itis more modifiable. It provides “an anatomical mechanism 
for correlation and co-ordinations of the most intricate pat- 
terns, and for the modification of the directions taken by 
nervous impulses arising from transient fluctuations in the 
relative permeability of the different junctions” (Herrick). 

The synapse, then, is a barrier, presumably a living semi- 
pervious membrane through which ions, bearers of impulses, 
can pass and in one direction only; the physico-chemical 
nature of the ions or conducting substance may be thereby 
altered. 

Synapses have been compared to the valves in the veins 
which prevent the blood from flowing backward, but the com- 
parison suggests nothing of the réle played by the synapse 
as a modifiable tissue making for impressionable and plastic 
behavior. 

With the arrangement of neurons and their processes as 
found in higher animals, the complicated patterns of sense 
organs, nerves, correlation centers, and response organs of 
reflex and instinctive behavior were possible. With the 
plasticity of the synaptic tissue, the kinds of memory and 
association which make for intelligent behavior were possible. 

When that “tooth” begins to “ache” the nerve that carries 
the ache impulse to central is not to be hushed up on a stop- 
ache order from central. It is central’s business to have a 
look at that tooth. As it is the nature of nerves to be nervous, 
it is the business of brains to attend to nerves—and to see 

290 


THE MECHANISM OF ADJUSTMENT 


to it that they are not exposed to stimuli for which they are 
not adapted. 

Any one nerve carries impulses toward or away from a 
nerve center, not both ways; it is either afferent or efferent. 
And when it is overloaded or stimulated above normal in- 
tensity, it carries a message of pain in addition. Therein lies 
the biologic function of pain. 


10 


The world into which we are born is not a world of walls, 
pictures, floor, rugs, chairs, bed, or even of bath, mother, and 
milk. It is a world of matter and energy, of things hot or 
cold, soft or hard, sharp or round, sweet or sour, of various 
physical and chemical stimuli, of various kinds of physical 
energy, vibrations in the ether and in material media. 

The world into which we are born is a small world, but it 
is a world of stimuli. 

Some made us afraid, some made us angry, some made us 
smile. What happened when the nurse declared, “It’s the 
homeliest brat I ever saw’? Much, if the mother heard it; 
to us, just born, nothing. The remark was a stimulus, but 
created no sensation in us: it was not an adequate stimulus. 
If the nurse had bawled that remark in our ear, we should 
have heard it—for we were born with ears attuned to the 
human voice. And it would have frightened us, not because 
of its sentiment, but because of its noise. A loud noise would 
have been a real stimulus: sound-waves of such length as to 
disturb our inherited equilibrium. We reacted to such rude 
noises. ‘They were adequate stimuli. 

The world of our environment keeps beating in upon us as 
stimuli: pressures, chemical substances, sound-waves, light- 
waves. How we interpret these stimuli, what they mean to us, 
these make up our world. To no two human beings can the 
world seem the same; nor be the same on any given two 
days or moments to the same individual. Under different 

291 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


circumstances, the Count of Monte Cristo would have traded 
his cave for a gallon of gasoline. 

Orion’s light-waves have been stimuli for men’s eyes for 
ages. To one age Orion was just “stars,” to another age these 
same light-waves are a library of astronomy, physics, and 
chemistry. A hickory tree is a dozen different things to a 
dozen different men; a dozen years later each man has a 
different notion of the tree. Same tree. 

A bloodhound picks up a scent and is off like a shot and 
tracks his man across fields and through forest. The stimulus 
that hound picked up means nothing to man. He may root 
his nose all over the lot, but he can never smell the truffles 
the hog’s nose finds beneath the soil. 

This outside world of stimulus, then, is real to us only in 
so far as stimuli reach us and as we interpret the stimuli. To 
other animals there are other worlds than ours. It must be 
so. Two men in an airplane see two worlds: how must the 
world they see look to an eagle, a lark, a bat, a butterfly? 
The world is so differént to some animals that their behavior 
can be explained in no terms of known sense of seeing, hear- 
ing, smelling, or tasting. 

Man’s tongue cannot distinguish sodium, ammonium, 
lithium, and potassium chlorides—they all taste salt; but the 
earthworm can, and reacts differently to each. 

Cut an earthworm in two. The tail end squirms as though 
in great pain. Not a squirm from the other end; it crawls 
away as unconcerned as you please. Knife is one kind of 
stimulus to head end, something else to the other end. 

A marked male moth was set free a mile and a half from 
a caged female. The male was on the cage the next morning. 
Our smell stimuli come in the form of gas or vapor. Some 
animals seem to smell vibrations. Ants especially sense 
stimuli far beyond human reach. 

The white rat can hear a noise, but not a tone; a tuning 
fork is no stimulus to its ear. Sound-waves are stimuli to 
such as are tuned in. 

292 


THE MECHANISM OF ADJUSTMENT 


A shadow is an adequate stimulus to a starfish. Cut out its 
eyespots, the shadow is still an adequate stimulus. Other 
marine forms without eyes respond to shadows. ‘‘Sensibility 
to difference,” Loeb called it. Even the ameba senses changes 
in intensity of light. Blinded frogs can distinguish red 
from blue light through their skin. Yet Watson found that 
rabbits and rats cannot distinguish red from darkness. 

Possibly all animals below man are color-blind. When the 
bull sees red, he sees heat. Radiant heat and light, after all, 
only differ in wave-length; both are ether vibrations. Certain 
animals evidently sense certain vibrations in their skin which 
are not stimuli to the skin of higher animals. Bees are color- 
blind, but they can see ultra-violet light rays invisible to 
human eyes. 

Space relations come to us as certain light-wave stimuli and 
we use our stereoscopic vision to determine these relations. 
Yet animals without stereoscopic vision and with practically 
immobile eyes give evidence of infallible judgment in esti- 
mating distance. 

How do they do it? We know our world as it reaches us, 
as sensation. We know what our sense organs sense; the 
range of vibration that is stimulus for eye and for ear; the 
range of chemical change that serves as stimulus to tongue, 
etc. We know our environment in so far as it serves as 
stimulus. Each kind of animal and plant knows its world in 
the same manner. And for each of us the world is what we 
sense it. For many there are no rainbows, sunsets, or Orions, 
except in picture books. 

Think again of the child at birth. To how few things is 
it receptive! In almost literal truth, it has no “sense” at 
all. And yet a normal newborn has all the sense organs or 
receptors of sensations it will ever have. They are the an- 
alyzers of stimuli from the world outside the body; the 
windows of the mind, Herrick calls them. Each can be pene- 
trated by or is receptive to only certain kinds and ranges of 
external energies. External ear, refracting media of the 

293 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


eye, etc., are merely devices which modify, strengthen, or 
concentrate, and so make more effective the action of the 
stimulus. Rarely is it the fault of the sense organs them- 
selves if “having eyes they see not, having ears they hear 
not”; nor if, with the whole world as stimulus, they never get 
beyond the vegetable plane of existence. 


Il 


Nerves conduct impulses. An impulse is a push. What 
is it that pushes? Pushes what? 

I look up: I see stars. I get a crack over the head: I 
see “stars.” Same stars? With an eye open I see light. I 
close both eyes and press my thumb on one eye: I see light. 
Remove both eyes and stimulate either optic nerve with 
electricity: I see light. Those who have had an eye removed 
on the operating table report “blinding light.” 

What do we see with, then? Obviously, not with the eyes. 
Even mechanical pressure on the optic nerve, when the eyes 
are removed, produces a sensation of light. We do not 
“see” with that nerve; it merely conducts the stimulus, the 
impulse—no matter who or what pushed. It must be that we 
see with the brain. We do: we also “hear” with the brain. 
And if our optic nerve were attached to our ear, stimulus of 
ear would be received by the brain as light. 

It follows that the impulse which is carried by the optic 
nerve may start outside or on any part of the nerve itself, 
but once on the nerve the impulse is carried to the brain and 
there registers as light, the intensity depending on the inten- 
sity of the impulse or stimulus. We say the light is seen by 
the eye because the brain projects the sensation to its point 
of origin. Pain in the stump of a leg is often “felt” in a 
foot that has been amputated. 

There may have been neither stars nor light in sight when 
I received the crack on the head; the sight center in the brain 
was stimulated: I saw “stars.” The optic nerve never carries 

294 


THE MECHANISM OF ADJUSTMENT 


sound impulses. No matter what the impulse that is put on 
it, the brain “sees” the impulse as light. 

The eye is the outer end-organ of the optic nerve. The 
retina is the receptive part; it is part of the brain itself—the 
seeing brain. The eye is the most highly specialized of all 
sense organs. It is called a special sense organ because 
specialized to receive certain stimuli which, carried to the 
brain, arouse a special sense, the sensation of sight. 


TABLE OF ETHER WAVE VIBRATIONS | 


Number of vibrations 


Wave length per second 


Receptor| Sensation 


00 to .1 mm. 0 to 3,000 billion None_ | None 
(electric waves) 


.1 mm. to 3,000 billion to Skin Radiant 
.0004 mm. 800,000 billion heat 


.0008 mm. to 400,000 billion to Retina | Light and 
.0004 mm. 800,000 billion color 


.0004 mm. to 800,000 billion to None | None 
.000059 mm. 5,100,000 billion 
(ultra-violet-rays) 


.0000008 mm. to | 400,000,000 billion to 
.00000005 mm. 6,000,000,000 billion | None | None 
(X-rays) 





“From Neurology, by C. Judson Herrick, 1922, by permission of the author 
and the publishers, W. B. Saunders Company. 


The eye itself is the receiving apparatus for certain kinds 
of physical energy—ether-waves; but it can receive ether- 
waves of certain lengths only. Thus, by reference to the 
foregoing table, it will be seen that of all the countless ether- 
waves that impinge upon our retina our eyes respond only 

| 295 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


to those with a rate of vibration of from 400,000,000,000,000 
to 800,000,000,000,000 per second, one octave of the ten 
contained in the solar spectrum. These light-waves travel at 
a velocity of 186,000 miles a second and vary from 1/30,000 
to 1/60,000 of an inch in length. Within this range the 
human eye can distinguish up to 230 pure spectral tints and 
up to 600,000 degrees of purity and intensity. 

Ether-waves vibrating faster than 800,000,000,000,000 
per second are called ultra-violet rays and are beyond human 
vision. X-rays are the ether-waves shorter than the ultra- 
violet. They are less than a quarter of a millionth of an 
inch long and vibrate at a rate from 400,000,000,000,000,- 
000 to 6,000,000,000,000,000,000 per second. Their pene- 
trating power is also astounding; neither flesh nor bone stops 
them, nor thin sheets of zinc, iron, or lead. The existence of 
the three octaves of the ultra-violet series and the X-rays 
series would have remained unknown to man had they not 
been discovered by indirect means in physical laboratories. 

Above the octave visible to the human eye are the six 
octaves of the infra-red. Of this series the human skin is re- 
ceptive to waves of from 3,000,000,000,000 to 400,000,- 
000,000,000 as radiant heat; as it is also to the octave which 
stimulates the eye as light. Thus, ether-waves of the same 
energy may be received by the eye as light, by the skin as 
heat. The physical stimulus is identical; and presumably 
the nerve impulses from skin and eye to brain are identical. 
The discrimination is made in the brain. Optic nerve im- 
pulses register light; warm-spot impulses register heat. 

Beyond the infra-red octaves of the solar spectrum are the 
long, slow electric, or Hertzian, waves; they never stimulate 
the eye, only the ear when transformed by a Marconi into 
waves in material media. Hertz’s discovery made the radio 
possible. 

So also the human ear has its limitations as receptor for 
sound-waves or vibrations in material media. The normal 
ear is a special sense organ for vibrations of about ten oc- 

296 








THE MECHANISM OF ADJUSTMENT 


taves, from forty feet to one-half inch in length, and from 30 
to 30,000 per second. Within this range about 11,000 dif- 
ferent pitches can be discriminated. Exceptional individuals 
are sensitive to vibrations as slow as 12, as fast as 50,000, 
per second. Vibrations ranging from mere contact up to 
1,552 per second are received by the skin and sensed as touch 
or pressure. Compared to light-waves, sound-waves travel 
at a snail’s pace, only 1,100 feet a second. 

The anatomy of the internal ear is quite as complicated 
as is that of the eye, though not so well understood. But 
presumably an essential part of the hearing organ is a tiny 
membrane in the inner ear which contains about 20,000 
exceedingly minute short fibres of varying length. These, it 
is thought, vibrate in response to wave-lengths transmitted 
within through the ear drum and the complicated mechanism 
of the middle ear. : 

Just as pressure on the eyes may be transmitted as light, so 
disturbance within the auditory apparatus registers on the 
auditory nerve as sound. Disturbed blood pressure inside the 
ears gives rise to such noises as ringing, roaring, rushing, etc. 

Both eyes and ears are specialized as to kind and amount of 
stimulus they receive; they have selective excitability and so 
lower the threshold of excitability for specific stimuli and 
heighten it for all other stimuli. The sound of a ticking 
watch can be carried through teeth and bones to the auditory 
nerve; but the ear will carry a tick so faint that it will not 
reach that nerve through teeth and bone. 

Our eyes see more and our ears hear more than a gorilla’s 
not because ours are better receptors or are excited by differ- 
ent stimuli, but because our experience differs from the 
gorilla’s; the difference is in the mind’s eye and ear. 

We do see with the eyes and hear with the ears; such is the 
nature of these receptors. Only it must be understood that 
the eye is a photo-receptor, the ear a sound and position 
receptor; our sensations of sight and of sound are dependent 
on brain cortex, where they rise to consciousness. In dreams 

297 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


we see sights and hear sounds—in the brain cortex only; the 
receptors or end-organs of sights and sounds may have re- 
ceived no stimuli. 

When an end-organ is discovered in man’s body adapted 
for stimuli such as can be transmitted by a nerve and which 
can be produced by “conscious thought” in another’s brain, 
then—and not until then—will it be time to investigate 
thought transference and mental telepathy. ‘Spirits’ may 
communicate with “spirits”; but allowing myself a maximum 
of “psychic”? power—whatever that means—I can conceive 
of no voice without mechanism, nor noise without friction. 
Science may never see with its eye the hydrogen-ion involved 
in nerve conduction, nor know how atoms or ether waves 
excite living protoplasm, but it cannot get excited about 
something it cannot even conceive. When Sir Oliver Lodge 
talks with “spirits,” he does it outside a physical laboratory 
and as a misguided enthusiast, and not as a physicist. To 
talk of or to ghosts is to talk of or to a ghost story. Neither 
X-rays nor Hertzian waves transcend any known laws of 
physics. Thought-transference and disembodied spirits 
transcend all the known laws of physics, nature, and common 
sense. 


I2 


Taste and smell organs are the other two of our four special 
senses. Eyes and ears are somatic receptors and receive phys- 
ical stimuli, ether or mechanical waves. Taste and smell 
organs are visceral receptors and are stimulated by chemicals 
in solution; hence they are called chemical receptors. Smell 
is also a somatic receptor, and as the stimuli for smell come 
from outside the body, the organ of smell, together with the 
organs for hearing and vision, is also called exteroceptor, to 
distinguish from proprioceptors and interoceptors within the 
body. 

But bear in mind that “special sense” organs are not pri- 

298 


THE MECHANISM OF ADJUSTMENT 


marily organs of special senses; they are special receptors 
to receive certain stimuli from the environment. Through 
adequate response to such stimuli we make the adjustments 
necessary to maintain life. The adjustments are made only 
after the central nervous system has analyzed the stimuli. 
Thus, to use Herrick’s figure, the odor of ethyl-alcohol may 
lead to action in the great somatic effector, the motor mecha- 
nism, to get the alcohol; the odor of that alcohol in the mouth 
may lead to swallowing it. The first odor was an exterocep- 
tive stimulus and led to a distance or somatic reaction; the 
odor in the mouth was an interoceptive stimulus and led to 
_ a visceral reaction. The discriminating mechanism was the 
central nervous system. 

We have a sense of taste; the organ of taste is the tongue. 
Is it? Most of the tongue cannot taste anything. Nor can 
any of it taste honey from molasses, black coffee from qui- 
nine, clam juice from beef broth, or an apple from an onion. 
It can feel fine distinctions; it is a better touch than taste re- 
ceptor. Taste buds only receive stimuli: sweet, on the tip 
of the tongue; sour, at the sides; salty, at the tip and sides; 
bitter, at the root. Only these four qualities: sweet, sour, 
salty, bitter. The fine discriminations we make in our mouth 
are with the aid of our olfactory organ in the nose and with 
our tongue as a tactile organ. Tea and wine “tasters” are 
tea and wine smellers. But there is enormous individual 
variation in the distribution of the taste buds; they may also 
be found in the soft palate, the epiglottis, even in the larynx. 

The bitter receptor is a thousand times more delicate than 
the salty—because there are more bitter poisons than salty 
ones? Why, then, should the bitter buds be at the root of the 
tongue? 

Taste buds are receptors for chemical stimuli. The sweet 
buds are excited by sugar; also by chloroform, lead acetate, 
and other things no more chemically related to sugar than 
a rabbit. There is sugar in a rabbit, none in lead acetate. 
When the sweet bud is excited, it tastes sweet; the bud seems 

299 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


to taste atoms or ions. Even the sugar in the blood may be 
tasted by victims of diabetes, as may the bitterness of bile 
by the victims of jaundice. 

A catfish can taste almost all over its body—it has taste 
buds scattered around in its skin. Do things taste sweet, 
sour, etc., to a catfish? 

We smell with our olfactory receptor, the lining of one of 
the seven small cavities in our nose. The stimuli are re- 
ceived on microscopic hairs bathed in liquid and must enter 
into its solution. Man, it is said, has “‘lost the sense of smell.” 
At any rate, our smell sense is miles behind a dog’s and 
probably not as keen as a shark’s. Yet the human nose easily 
picks up the scent of an almost inconceivably small amount 
of an alcohol derivative which smells like garlic and is called 
mercaptan. 

How small is “almost inconceivably”? It requires a thim- 
bleful of air to fill the cavity of the smell receptor. One 
460-billionth of a gram of mercaptan evaporated in a thimble 
of air sniffed up our nose smells like garlic. What is the 
nature of that stimulus? In that almost inconceivably small 
fraction of a gram of vapor there are 200,000,000,000 mole- 
cules. 

Life smelled before there were noses. The skin of the 
humble sea anemone is peppered all over with olfactory re- 
ceptors. No doubt the ameba smells and tastes. It must have 
chemical receptors. It must distinguish useful from noxious 
molecules. It may know how atoms taste and smell. It is 
certain that a world of environment acts on both animals and 
plants without tongue or nose. Yet they are sensitive: they 
respond to stimuli. Human beings deprived of the four 
special senses manage to live and to experience sensations; 
sensations arise in the cortex of the brain. 

Of all our special senses, smell sensation dies out quickest. 
The first whiff is the best—or the worst if it is that kind of an 
odor. If it is, and dangerous, move; in a few moments it can 
no longer be smelled. The odor may last, the smell sensation 

300 


THE MECHANISM OF ADJUSTMENT 


passes. But not the memory: some of childhood’s vividest 
memories are mixed up with the smell of dust, burning 
brush, ete. 

While a certain patch inside our nose and certain buds on 
our tongue and in our mouth are specialized for certain 
chemical stimuli, our skin and the mucous membrane of our 
lips, mouth, and alimentary canal can taste acids, mustard, 
and all irritating substances. In other words, certain parts 
of our body are sensitive to certain chemical stimuli; they are 
less sensitive than the specialized end-organs for chemical 
stimuli. For example, ethyl-alcohol in dilution strong enough 
to be smelled must be 24,000 times as strong to be tasted, and 
80,000 times as strong before it excites the mucous membrane 
of the mouth. © 

In speaking of certain vestigial structures of our body, 
reference was made to Jacobson’s organ in the cartilage of 
our nose. There is some evidence that this vestige still func- 
tions as a common chemical sense organ. It originally served 
to smell food after it was taken into the mouth and was con- 
nected directly with the mouth. These openings exist in 
snakes’ mouths and receive the tips of the forked tongue; they 
can distinguish odors from tastes of food in the mouth. We 
cannot. For that reason “all food tastes alike’’ when our nose 
is stopped up with a cold. 


13 


Every human individual normal enough to live beyond the 
walls of an asylum lives because he has an equipment by 
which he can keep on making adjustments to changing condi- 
tions. The adjustments we make as individuals are indi- 
vidual adjustments, and they will be determined by many 
factors. But the adjusting mechanism itself has common 
features. 

Thus we all are, and at all stages of our life are, sensitive 
to change. We sense change by receptors which are stimu- 

301 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


fated by change. But we fail to realize the nature of recep- 
tors, or understand what we sense, if we think our special 
sense organs are all or are the supreme receptors. We think 
of glands as regulators, and so they are; of our motor 
mechanism as effector, and so it is; and of our nervous sys- 
tem as conductor, and so it is; but they are also receptors. 
Our entire body is receptive, even as we are responsive. 

Kinesthetic sense: a sixth sense, it has been called; or pro- 
prioceptor, to distinguish it from the five senses of sight, 
hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching—exteroceptors which 
receive stimuli from without. By the kinesthetic sense we 
receive information from within. Without that information 
our motor mechanism would be useless, nor could we ever 
learn to talk or walk. 

Impulses arise in this mechanism: in muscles, tendons, 
joints. All have special sense-organ structure. They respond 
to pressure. With every contraction of muscle in talking, 
writing, walking, etc., pressure is exerted somewhere, nerve 
impulses are released. As these muscles are in opposite sets 
—to raise or lower the arm or head, for example—we come 
to know where our head, arms, legs, fingers, toes, etc., are 
without having to look. 

We are not conscious of these countless stimuli, rarely 
think of them except in pain or fatigue. Nor is it easy to 
define the stimulus which affects them, largely because we 
learn to use our motor mechanism very early in life. But 
they are among our most important sense organs. Normally 
our muscles are in tone, neither fully extended nor fully con- 
tracted. Such explicit bodily movements as eating, drinking, 
talking, smoking, walking, etc., function as perfect habits, 
and, once acquired, with as little effort as though they were 
inherent habits. It is this kinesthetic sense which enables us 
to train the motor mechanism to function so perfectly. 

The three semicircular canals in the inner ear are most im. 
portant sense organs; by the information they furnish the 
body learns to balance itself. Without them we could not 

302 


THE MECHANISM OF ADJUSTMENT 


orientate our body along the line of gravity. Nor without the 
supplementary mechanism to the canals could we keep our 
head in equilibrium when the body itself is at rest. Orienta- 
tion is quite as important as locomotion. 

There is an organic sense. Organs, tissues, etc., in thoracic, 
abdominal, and pelvic cavities are on the autonomic line of 
nerves, but they are also supplied by sensory (afferent) 
nerves which reach the central nervous system direct. Mouth, 
stomach, heart, diaphragm, peritoneum, and urogenital or- 
gans are especially sensitive. Stimuli from these regions 
reach central and initiate movements in the motor mechanism. 
Indeed our most intimate and personal reactions are in 
response to stimuli originating in unstriped or visceral muscle 
tissue. 

We have an “appetite,” we are “hungry,” “thirsty,” 
“sleepy,” “tired”: these are real senses. Where. or what the 
receptors for these senses are is not yet known. But we can 
speak of the viscera themselves as receptors. ‘Thus the 
stomach is the “receptor” or organ of hunger when its muscles 
set up hunger contractions; the throat is an organ of thirst 
when its mucous membrane is dry; etc. Herrick distinguishes 
further: organs of nausea; organs of respiratory, circulatory, 
and sexual sensations; and organs of sensations of distension 
of cavities and of visceral pain. 

These organic impulses lead to adjustment reactions: food, 
water, sex, voidance of noxious stimuli, etc. They are back 
of life. Impulses from these unstriped muscles must rouse 
action in the skeletal or striped muscles. And so we are 
driven to seek water, food, make love, etc. If the motor 
mechanism does not satisfy these organic impulses, they fur- 
nish the drive for emotional postures and attitudes. 

As many of these organic impulses leading to bodily activ- 
ity function rhythmically, we are supplied by our body itself 
with a reflex basis for a sense of time. 

Our skin itself is a marvelous receptor, but it is organized 
for certain ranges and kinds of stimuli. These excite special 

303 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


nerve endings rather than special organs. One group is sen- 
sitive to touch and mild degrees of temperature. When 
stimulated the sensation is felt as though it belonged to the 
objects themselves. The other group senses pressure and 
pain, and heat above 113 degrees and cold below 68 degrees; 
the sensations are felt as on or in the skin and not as proper- 
ties of the objects which excited the stimuli. 

Stimulus to a heat spot is felt as heat, never as pain. Pain 
spots can be excited by chemicals, mustard, acids, by cutting, 
pinching, etc., by electric current, by freezing or burning, and 
by osmotic action such as salt in an open wound. Whatever 
the stimulus, the pain spot registers pain: it hurts! 

And there are paradoxes. Why does menthol feel cold 
and carbon dioxide feel warm to the skin? Or a warm ob- 
ject feel cold when applied to a cold spot? Why do we have 
chills when we have fever? We speak of feeling “cold to. 
the very marrow of our bones,” but no temperature receptor 
has been located within the body. 

A hand plunged into hot water presumed to be cold “feels” 
cold. A nurse, told to keep her patient’s hand in water as 
hot as he could “comfortably” stand it, kept on applying 
heat. He could stand it—even up to the point where the skin 
came off! A frog shows greater ability to “get used to it.” 
Put a frog in a pot of cold water and raise the temperature 
very slowly; the water can be brought to a boil without the 
frog showing the slightest sign of feeling. In both cases the 
noxious stimulus was too gradual. 

Suggestion may explain why the hand felt hot water as 
cold, as it explains the difference in the sensation of a wisp of 
cotton and a lock of a girl’s hair on one’s brow. But sugges- 
tion does not explain the painless scalded hand, nor did it 
keep the frog’s mind at ease while it got cooked. The hand 
became adapted; loss of skin was the price. The frog became 
adapted; it lost its sensitivity and its life. As we do in pro- 
longed fever or in starvation. 

“What hurts, teaches,” says a Latin proverb. That is why 

304 


THE MECHANISM OF ADJUSTMENT 


we have pain spots. That is why when in great pain we have 
little room for other feelings. A boy might forget a toothache 
at a ball game, but not an earache. Severe pain must have 
the right-of-way; it is not easily shunted on to a side track. 
This can be shown on a dog whose brain has been put out of 
action. Stimulation of a pain spot and a pressure spot in the 
same region of its leg excites two different nerves: one draws 
the foot up as though it were wounded, the other extends the 
foot as in walking. Both are reflex movements. But, obvi- 
ously, the leg cannot be drawn up and extended at the same 
time. Which reflex does the brainless dog make? The one 
which answers the danger signal, every time. 

We may be warned that “‘the tooth will hurt only a tiny 
bit”; we twinge just the same. We jump in spite of our- 
selves when we hear a big gun fired; wink, though we know 
the experimenter’s hand will not reach our eye. 

We have reflexes and reflexes. Those which respond to 
danger signals take precedence; they are prepotent. No 
matter where it comes from or what the excitation, whether 
cinder in the eye, frost on the ear, or gas in the intestine, 
pain isacall for help. Unfortunately, for many of our pains 
we have no adequate reflex response; we call in the doctor 
to become the effector of the reflex arc. 

But normally we are free of pain. Only when this or that 
receptor transmits a message of greater intensity than the 
nerve is accustomed to conduct does the message break out 
of its beaten path to encounter a path of greater resistance. 
Any part of our body may be a receptor of pain. Even a 
new idea may be painful to a brain cortex which is all 
made up. 

Life is sensitive to vital situations and must respond to 
meet such situations. But the excitability of living beings 
is not a particular this or that; it is an energy-complex played 
upon by countless stimuli. Some provoke one kind of 
response, some another; most of them none at all—no 
response is needed. The response must be adequate, of a 

305 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


kind appropriate for carrying on. To classify receptors 
according to the nature of the stimulus or the kind of energy 
which excites them, does not tell us all the avenues by which 
the world as stimulus beats in upon our body. 

Because our receptors are specialized they are of enormous 
importance. Through them we keep in “touch” with our 
environment; we smell “‘the battle afar off, the thunder of the 
captains, and the shouting.” Through any one of several 
receptors we can become excited by fire before its heat 
scorches our body. 

Through our special senses we see, hear, smell, taste, and 
feel our way through life and learn of each other and of the 
world in which we live. They are good enough for practical 
purposes, but they fall short of human ambition. Science 
sees with telescope, microscope, fluoroscope, spectrum, etc.; 
hears with amplifiers: hears a bee change its mind and what 
wireless waves through the ether say. Herrick asks us to 
think of what the world would be to us if our eyes were like 
eagles’, our noses as keen as dogs’, and our bodies sensitive 
to Hertzian waves, X-rays and the like, and to other forms 
of energy manifestations as yet unknown to us. As we are, 
we are earthbound within the limits set by our physical 
sensory equipment; “nor can our thinking transcend the realm 
of sense experience.” 


14 


A fly lands on my finger: it annoys me; I wiggle my 
finger: the annoyance flies away. There was a slight lapse 
of time between landing of fly and wiggling of finger: the 
reaction time, the time required for a stimulus to be answered 
by a response. It was about .05 of a second. 

Why so much time? What was I doing all this time? J 
had nothing to do with it. I was not conscious of the perform- 
ance; it happens also in our sleep. Had I been conscious I 
might have stopped the finger response to admire the tiny 

306 


THE MECHANISM OF ADJUSTMENT 


living airplane that had made a perfect landing. I might 
have given the fly leave to study my finger as long ‘as it 
pleased, wondering why my finger, of all spots in the world, 
stimulated it at that particular instant to respond by landing. 

It lands: stimulus. That stimulus, as impulse, is put on 
an afferent or sensory nerve for transmission to central. The 
impulse can lead to no response until put on an efferent or 
motor nerve ending in an effector, a response mechanism. In 
only one place can impulse be transferred from sensory ta 
motor nerve: central nervous system—brain and spinal cord. 

All the switchboards of all the centrals of all the telephone 
systems on earth combined into one would be a simple 
exchange compared to our own central exchange. This cen- 
tral, with the nerve trunks leading in and out and the rami- 
fications of the individual nerves of the trunk lines and the 
ramifications of the branches of the billions of individual 
neurons—this is our nervous system. 7 

That fraction of a second between excited finger and finger 
wiggle is the time it took for the impulse to be transmitted to 
central, there switched to another nerve to carry an impulse 
back to the finger. Same finger. But the impulse started on 
the skin of the finger; it ended in certain muscles of the finger. 

Reflex action; there is a reflex arc; but central fills the 
breach in that arc. The skin of finger cannot talk to muscles 
of finger. Skin can inform central, central can give orders 
to muscles. Every message that comes to us from outside 
the body is carried to central, every response to such messages 
is directed from central. 

The .05 of a second for that reflex assumes that the 
response was automatic: that it was a true reflex, that my 
conscious self had no part in it. Several factors enter into 
reflex time. Had the fly been a red-hot coal the time would 
have shortened: a vital stimulus gets a more prompt response. 
Reflex time is also conditioned by the nature of the stimulus: 
we respond more promptly to sound than to light. A third 
factor is the number of synapses that must be passed. They 

307 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


seem to act as switches or relay stations to control the direc- 
tion of impulses—at one time open for, at another time 
blocking, conduction. 

The physical contact of fly on finger skin called out the 
reflex. But the sight of the fly or the sound of its wings 
could have led to the same reflex. In other words, any one 
of several distinct kinds of receptors might be excited by the 
fly and lead to the same reflex. The messages are distinct: 
one from eye, another from ear, another from skin; the 
answer from central may be the same. 

I was stretched out on a blanket under a tree in Colombia, 
sound asleep—noonday siesta. I suddenly found myself on 
my feet—and a long green snake in front of me. I was 
unaware of awakening or of getting to my feet, or of having 
seen the snake until that instant. 

What had been the stimulus? My companion, dozing on 
his blanket a dozen feet away, had turned over just as the 
snake was crawling across my chest. He yelled, “Snake!” 
I jumped to my feet. My whole body could perform a reflex 
action before my conscious self could take charge of the 
situation and make human response: kill the snake. <A 
cultural reaction. Had my interest been ophidia and not 
ethnology, my behavior would have been different. Brought 
up as a Hindu and without influence of Serpent-Eve tradition, 
that snake would be alive to-day, for all of me. 

Something happens to messages from the outside world 
when delivered to central. The word snake might have led 
to the same impulsive reflex—an avoiding response; but the 
messages already handled by central determined my reaction 
to that particular message. We come to have reaction pat- 
terns, complexes of behavior. We condition our reflexes; 
we condition ourselves. Our nervous system itself becomes 
conditioned, is conditioned, day by day, from birth. The 
conditioning factors are environment—an East Side tenement 
or the Babbitts of Main Street. 

In other words, what behaves is not brain nor central] 

308 


THE MECHANISM OF ADJUSTMENT 


nervous system nor reflex arc, but this boy, that girl, this 
woman, that man, integrated by an integrating organ, adjust- 
ing through an adjusting mechanism. Behavior, like life, 
resides in individual packages. The response of a crowd 
may be more intense; even as one wolf hesitates to tackle a 
lion, but as one of a pack takes a chance. Crowd and pack 
behavior occur because man and wolf vary their response 
with the nature and intensity of the stimulus. 

The business of the central nervous system is to regulate 
and adjust behavior according to the nature of the stimulus. 
Few, if any, tissues, structures, organs, glands, muscles, or 
vessels of the body are beyond its reach. Our vegetative 
processes normally go on without conscious thought, nor can 
we control them by our “will.”’ But let one of these processes 
go on a strike, central knows. Knows because, as all roads 
led to Rome, all nerves end in central. All nerves deliver 
their messages to central. Central is responsible for the 
behavior of the individual. 

Certain nerves end here, others there. There are centers 
for this, centers for that. But central functions as a unit; it 
functions for a unit—the individual. Nerves so knit together 
all parts of the body that central can organize the body as a 
whole for life—and finds ways out of difficulties that baffle 
man. 

A child is born deaf, dumb, and blind. What kind of 
mental life is within its reach? That was Helen Keller’s 
fate. Yet her mental development was astounding and little 
less than miraculous. 


15 


A snowball aimed at me hits a dog. The dog jumps, yelps, 
and runs. The next ball hits me. Can you predict my 
behavior, as I do the dog’s? I cannot. I might jump, yelp, 
and run; I might make no outward response. Ten years 
later I might marry the girl who threw the ball; or forty years 

309 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


Jater read with dry eye that the boy who threw it had killed 
himself with wood alcohol. 

The message from snowball was delivered to the spinal 
cord. The cord could answer it by making certain bodily 
adjustments. Meanwhile the medulla had been informed and 
was ready to contribute to the reaction; by a wink or a sneeze 
or a cough, or orders to heart or blood vessels to prepare for 
action. 

What action? What next? Here is where the 10,- 
000,000,000 neurons of the cerebral cortex get into the 
picture. 

Spinal cord and brain stem (chiefly medulla) are the two 
lower divisions of the central nervous system. Cerebellum 
and cerebrum are the two higher. The cerebrum itself is the 
supreme central; larger in man in proportion to weight of 
body or of spinal cord than in any other animal; it is evolu- 
tion’s latest improvement as central of a central nervous 
system. 

The eighteen inches of spinal cord is central for a few 
important automatic reflexes and receives the thirty-one pairs 
of spinal nerves which supply skin, motor mechanism, and 
parts of the viscera. It ends in and is intimately connected’ 
with the brain, which consists of the other three divisions of 
central: brain stem; cerebellum (little brain); cerebrum 
(brain). 

The medulla of the brain stem, an enlargement of the 
spinal cord just inside the skull, is probably the busiest center 
of central. Here end all but four of the twelve cranial 
nerves; through here almost all impulses pass from one 
division of central to another. Every mark I make with my. 
pencil has first traversed the medulla. It is also a real central 
of its own, the center for such important reflexes as winking 
(in part), sneezing, coughing, chewing, sucking, swallowing, 
vomiting, and the secretion of saliva and gastric juice. It is 
also the center for breathing, for regulating the size of the 

310 


THE MECHANISM OF ADJUSTMENT 


blood vessels, and for speeding up and slowing down heart- 
beat. 

The medulla is only one-twentieth of the weight of the 
entire brain—and hollow at that! How does it control so 
many vital functions? By receiving impulses and setting this 
or that mechanism at work. I step into a tub of cold water. 
The cold receptors of the foot transmit the news to a center 
in the medulla, the medulla orders the blood vessels of the 
skin to close in: there is an enemy to proper body temperature 
about. 

And so it works. On behalf of the medulla? No; on 
behalf of the body. The body is always adjusting itself: to 
bad air, to poor food, to cold water, to thirst, to fleas and 
flies, to summer and winter, to tight shoes and high collars 
and corsets, and countless other frills and fads listed in 
civilization’s catalogue. 

The catalogue is prepared in the higher centers of Ln 
We can live with a bullet hole in the “higher centers”; a 
bird-shot in the medulla stops the heart. 

While sitting in a chair or walking about the little brain 
center is in control. The chief function of the cerebellum 
is to keep us right side up. This is more important for 
fishes and birds than for some men, and more difficult for 
men than for any quadrupeds. But all vertebrates have a 
well-developed cerebellum. To preserve our balance and 
adjust our equilibrium is an enormously involved process. 
No wonder the cerebellum is convoluted and covered with 
gray matter. Probably 1,000,000,000 neurons take part in 
every move we make to keep straight. To the cerebellum 
come messages from the pressure receptors in our feet, from 
the receptors in all joints, tendons, ligaments, and muscles, 
from the sight receptors of our eyes, and especially from the 
position and motion receptors of our inner ears. ‘The cere- 
bellum correlates and co-ordinates these messages; adjust- 
ments are thus made possible. We can walk like a man, or 
swim like a fish, or fly like a bird. 

dll 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


A blindfolded person maintains his equilibrium with 
difficulty: the cerebellum is denied one important source of 
information needed to adjust the body. The blind man 
learns to preserve his balance. Every movement of his motor 
mechanism registers in the cerebellum; the motor mechanism 
itself, in whole and in detail, is a receptor. The cerebellum 
interprets messages from this sensory field. 

The claim has recently been made by Japanese neurologists 
that the cerebellum also co-ordinates movements of tongue, 
lips, and vocal cords, and therefore regulates speech. In 
that case it is both balancing and talking brain. 


16 


Spinal cord; mid-brain; cerebellum; higher, higher, 
higher. Further away from the simple life. But as the 
spinal cord is the region which contains the mechanism for 
effecting many reflex actions, so the whole central nervous 
system is the region for the mechanism for effecting all 
actions and reactions. The brain differs from the cord only 
in the fact that it contains more and longer reflex arcs or 
nerve paths and more numerous connections. Centers are 
regions where diverse impulses can be co-ordinated and 
appropriate adjustments thereby become possible. There 
are higher and higher centers. The cerebrum is the highest 
or supreme adjustor. 

In a well-filled head the cerebrum does most of the filling; 
and what the icing is to a cake the gray matter is to the 
cerebrum. This gray matter is called cortex because it is 
the bark of the cerebrum. The cortex is also found on the 
cerebellum and inside the medulla and spinal cord. It is 
made up of actual neuron bodies and their synapses—hence 
its color, gray. White matter contains the fibers or conduct- 
ing structure of neurons. Because of the many deep infold- 
ings or convolutions of the brain, the gray matter contains 
enormous numbers of neurons. Degeneration of that gray 

312 


THE MECHANISM OF ADJUSTMENT 


matter, whether from syphilitic “general paralysis of the 
insane” or from other causes, ends in death. 

We walk through life like men because we are human 
beings and our motor mechanism calls for an upright body 
balanced on two legs, one of which must be off the ground 
half the time we are walking. Meanwhile, to preserve that 
gait, all our body weight except that of one leg is delicately 
balanced on a ball half the size of a billiard ball. This is 
a very clever trick and requires many months to learn, during 
which we get many hard falls. Once learned, we do it with- 
out effort the rest of our life, provided we keep sober and 
receive no injury to our cerebellum. 

Injury to the cerebellum need not be fatal but does throw 
us off our stride. We stagger about and in general suffer 
from lowered muscle .co-ordination. But we can get over 
this. The stagger need not be permanent, though the injury 
to the cerebellum is. Why? 

The cerebrum has taken over the function. This is the 
clue to cerebrum. It is neither special organ nor performs 
special function: it can learn to do anything. Its capacity 
is incalculable. Its switching capacity alone runs into 
figures which make German marks look like gold coin and 
distances between stars like diameters on a mile track. 

It is because of cerebral gray matter’s range of behavior 
permutations that a Greek professor could devote a lifetime 
to the solution of a new diacritical mark on an ancient manu- 
script—to discover just before he died that it was a fly speck. 

A child born without cerebrum lived four years. It pre- 
served the reflexes it was born with: sucking, crying, sneezing, 
grasping, etc. It never learned to recognize its mother nor 
how to hold a bottle. It never learned any controlled or 
voluntary motions. It would lie for hours and hours in 
unchanged position. Of nervous or mental growth there was 
none, of intelligence less than that of a decerebrate frog. 

If the cerebrum must be labeled, call it the organ of asso- 

313 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


ciative memory and the structural foundation of human 
culture. 

The cortex of the cerebrum is a clearing-house, or, as Child 
calls it, “‘a deliberative assembly to which reports of matters 
requiring consideration come in from the various groups or 
bureaus and in which they are considered and action taken 
through the proper channels.” But before they enter this 
highest court they must pass one or more of the lower correla- 
tion centers. 

In other words, with a toothache on my mind the snowball 
that hits me is relatively unimportant and gets scant attention 
from me, and could be answered by a mere jump reflex. But 
under ordinary conditions the stimulus of snowball reaches 
the cerebrum. Then I become conscious; this or that region 
of the cortex is intensely active; connections are made with 
other regions. A conflict goes on; the solution of the conflict 
will determine my reaction. Hesitation on my part means 
that the problem is not yet resolved. When a decision is 
reached, reaction follows. While the matter is being adjusted 
a boy knocks my hat off. This also reaches the cortex: the 
lower centers cannot make adequate response to such an 
insult! Another region of the cortex becomes the scene of 
violent activity. 

Consciousness at this or that moment, then, is determined ~ 
by the field of our cortex at the moment active: impulses have. 
come in which must be answered and which cannot be 
answered except with the aid of the cortex. Only the cortex 
has the complete files of all that has gone before. Only the 
cortex can hear all the evidence from all the body: eyes, 
ears, and the million and one receptors of a body which itself 
is receptor and effector and which in consciousness calls upon 
the superadjustor cortex to govern its behavior. If a stimulus 
is not of enough importance to require cortex adjustment, 
it is not strong enough to get into consciousness. 

What messages reach the cortex: odor of a bad egg, burst 
of thunder, flash of lightning, taste of a quinine pill, feel of 

314 


THE MECHANISM OF ADJUSTMENT 


a red-hot poker, sting of an insult, colic, toothache? They 
do, but they cannot reach the cortex direct. As Herrick 
points out: “‘No simple sensory impulses ordinarily reach 
the cortex, but only nervous impulses arising from the lower 
correlation centers.” Of all the messages that reach the cor- 
tex, those from the eyes are the purest: they have less sub- 
cortical matter to deal with first. “It is no accident that the 
visual sense plays a dominant rédle in human cortical 
function.” 

That the lower courts of the body can perform so many 
living functions so well is why so little is referred to the 
supreme cortex adjustor, and also explains why so many have 
nothing to think about: their body does their thinking for 
them. 

U7. 


Gall, a Viennese surgeon, was the first to suggest that the 
cerebrum or brain proper is a group of organs, each perform- 
ing a separate function. Out of that suggestion grew 
phrenology and nonsense and finally a disregard for the 
cerebrum. No one disregards the cerebrum nowadays, except 
under penalty of losing control of all that distinguishes man 
from his lowest ancestors. The cerebrum is a single organ, 
not yet well understood, but known to be the most complex 
structure yet thrown up by the 100,000,000 years of evolving 
life. 

Real individuality in life begins with the cerebrum. The 
less cerebrum, the less power to learn. The greater the 
cerebrum, the greater the capacity to learn from experience. 
Of all the structures man has inherited, he knows least about 
the one which made human culture possible; and because he 
has used it least, human civilization has become the senseless 
thing that it is. 

A lion can learn to lie down beside a lamb, but a moth 
cannot learn to let a flame alone. The moth has no cerebrum. 

The cerebrum is one organ, but is the central for several 

315 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


centers or areas of motor and sensory function. These areas 
are connected by association areas, large regions of the brain 
cortex which have no direct connection with the brain stem, 
and stimulation of which leads to no known effect. They are 
as yet the unknown, the great silent fields; the “deepest mys- 
tery” of the brain, Mitchell calls them. They are the new 
parts of the brain: “probably blanks at birth and upon them 
is recorded the story of a lifetime.” At any rate, without 
them we could learn no new habits, no conditioned reflexes, 
nor become intelligent human beings. 

The sensory areas for sight, hearing, and smell are def- 
initely located on the cerebrum. The taste areas are not well 
known. The skin and kinesthetic sense areas are known; 
they are at the endings of the afferent paths from skin, 
viscera, muscle, and skeleton receptors. A pain area has not 
been localized. 

The following motor areas have been localized: face, body, 
opening of jaws, closing of jaws, mouth, tongue, neck, vocal 
cords, nose, eyelid, ear, chest, shoulder, arm, elbow, wrist, 
fingers, trunk, hip, leg, knee, ankle, foot, toes. 

Which means that injury to a certain small spot on your 
brain cortex puts your toes out of commission. Your right 
. thumb is paralyzed: injury in the cortex of the left cerebrum. 
But when a deformed limb wastes away, it means that the 
lower motor neurons of the peripheral nerves are destroyed. 

Look again over the list of motor areas localized. How 
many of these structures can you see with your eyes? ‘Those 
localized motor areas of the brain cortex are called the pic- 
tured movement areas. You wiggle your thumb: do your 
eyes see the muscles involved? No more does the brain see 
or know anything of muscle. It knows muscle sensation 
because it receives impulses from movement in muscles. It 
knows thumb movements through the eyes. As Woods Jones 
puts it, the cortex comes to have a vast store of knowledge 
of concrete movements, not only of thumb, but of every move- 
ment the body makes that the eyes can see. 

316 


THE MECHANISM OF ADJUSTMENT 


No repeated pictured movements ever become reflexes. 
They must be initiated in the cortex of the cerebrum. With 
one-half of the brain cortex injured, we cannot walk or per- 
form any voluntary or pictured movements with the other 
half of the body. With all the motor areas injured, there 
is no learned action in the motor mechanism; certain 
reflexes only may remain intact. 

The baby learns to put its finger on its foot, to put its toe 
in its mouth, to walk, to make all purposive pictured move- 
ments, through the conditioning of and learning made possi- 
ble by the association areas of the brain cortex. The cortex 
itself is the receptive area for different impressions. In the 
association areas they are sorted, stored, blended. 

Thus, early conduct is pictured in terms of action. The 
child really begins to organize its motor mechanism when it 
has memories of past movements. It can then begin to form 
pictured concepts of possible future movements. A little 
later it can estimate its ability to make movements. And 
with this ability, we have dawning consciousness and youth- 
ful ideals of conduct. 

Davenport speaks of his nine-months-old son: “He cannot 
talk, dress himself, or attend to his animal needs. He is 
word and figure blind, cruel to the cat; appropriates others’ 
property, and wants everything at the inconvenience of others. 
He is a low-grade imbecile without moral ideals.” Which 
simply means that of altruistic behavior we have none at 
birth and gain none in the first nine months. 

Insanity is a disorder of conduct. The pictured move- 
ment area of the brain has gone out of action. The body 
does not track: one part goes one way, another part does not 
go at all. Impulses from all the different parts of the body 
no longer have a meeting place where they can be co-ordi- 
nated, and as a result of such co-ordination adjust the body 
as an individua! unit. 

The ideals of conduct conditioned in the growing brain 

317 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


will have much to do with the roads that will be open or 
closed to the adult brain. 

The blind boy’s brain has its pictured movement areas, 
only the “pictures” the eye sees must be supplied through 
the aid of other sensory organs. But no sense plays such a 
role in human affairs as the visual. No impulses are deliv- 
ered to the cortex with so little delay or pass so few sentinels 
en route as those from the eyes. 

But to take localization areas too literally is to overlook 
the real functions of the cerebral cortex. They are associa- 
tional rather than specific. The cerebrum is a superimposed 
center. It takes on habits—localized centers presumably 
thereby come into being; but it can form new habits. It is 
the dominant center only when the lower centers fail or dis- 
agree. But no area of the cortex is the exclusive center of 
this or that or of any particular function. The centers of the 
so-called sensory and motor areas are merely “nodal points,” 
as Herrick calls them, “in an exceedingly complex system 
of cells and fibers which must act as a whole in order to 
perform any function whatsoever.” In any other sense, a 
cortical center for the performance of a particular function 
is an absurdity. 

Herrick distinguishes two prime functions of the cortex. 
First, correlations of great complexity and with many diverse 
factors; of value because of the capacity for choice between 
many possible different reactions to the situation. Next, 
retentiveness of past individual impressions in such form as 
to permit of being recalled later and incorporated into new 
stimulus complexes. This is a high type of organic memory; 
it makes for modifiability of behavior. The mechanism of 
correlation functions may be innate; the retentiveness or 
“memory” function is presumably acquired after birth and 
is the supreme factor in the education of human beings. 
With the correlation function we are enabled to give expres- 
sion to our original nature; with the memory function we 
can modify our innate tendencies and take on the trappings 

318 


THE MECHANISM OF ADJUSTMENT 


of the culture which happens to be the fashion in our own 
home town. 


18 


The first raisin I bit into was wrapped around a quinine 
pill. About that time I traded a jackknife for a chunk of 
chocolate, which I devoured on the spot—and got sick. I 
was thereby prejudiced against two people and thereafter 
disliked two things. I can recall no detail of the chocolate 
or raisin incident; I only know that the sight of chocolate 
is disagreeable, the odor of a raisin unpleasant. 

I left a dark kitchen in a hurry and nearly split my head 
on an outstretched pump handle. The pump was removed. 
Twenty years later I returned to that house. Leaving the 
dark kitchen that night, I ducked the pump handle and was 
conscious of a tingling sensation on my forehead. I had 
forgotten the pump: my body had not forgotten the handle. 
Even now, I sometimes feel queer when I leave that kitchen 
in the dark. 

There are two kinds of memories: one is built into the body 
reaction-system and generally is beyond recall; the other is 
conscious memory and presumably entangled in the meshes 
of the neurons of the brain cortex. 

I may search all day through these neurons for a mislaid 
name. The next morning I hear some one whistling “Annie 
Rooney’’; the name pops into my head: Rooney! Conscious 
effort failed to stimulate the “Rooney” cells: the whistled 
tune excited the right spot. 

Every neuron has potential connection with every other 
neuron of the nervous system. The connection may be incal- 
culably indirect; the paths are there. 

A look, a smile, a dimple, may excite a thousand sparks to 
fire, a thousand million neurons to activity. The total 
reaction will be the product of untold individual reactions, 
each complex. Every one of these reactions modifies the 

319 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


reaction-system. It is not that we pile up experiences, but 
that experiences themselves both change the nature of the 
system and are themselves determined by the nature of the 
system. 

The first “dimple” we experienced in life may have been 
wrapped around a quinine pill or too much chocolate; we 
are thereby “conditioned” against dimples. 

Pawlow’s classic experiments on dogs laid the foundation 
for an understanding of the conditioned or psychic reflex. 
By an ingenious mechanical device he could determine when 
and how much a dog’s mouth waters: a reflex action of the 
salivary glands. This reflex normally takes place when the 
hungry animal sees or smells food. 

A dog fed by one certain person only secretes saliva when 
this person appears. The sight of the person sets off the 
reflex mechanism: there may be no food in sight. Another 
dog, fed only when a certain musical note is sounded, even- 
tually shows mouth water whenever it hears that particular 
note. If the note were one of 1,000 vibrations per second, 
a note of 960 or of 1,100 vibrations calls out no response. 
Another dog easily learned to distinguish 110 beats per 
second from 100 beats per second of a metronome. 

A dog is fed exactly two minutes after a bell is sounded. 
Its mouth waters just two minutes after the bell sounds; this 
is both a conditioned and a delayed reflex. Many persons 
can “set” themselves and dispense with an alarm clock. I 
invariably anticipate an alarm clock by about three minutes. 
The nervous system itself can keep time. 

Another dog was always fed with a ringing bell or a 
flashing light: no food when both stimuli were present. Now 
note. The dog’s mouth begins to water when the bell begins 
to ring; while the bell is still ringing the light is flashed; the 
flow stops: light and bell are no stimulus. 

We go through that countless times in our lives. Suddenly 
lose our appetite—for innumerable things besides food. A 
stimulus which calls forth a voiding or conflicting reaction 

320 


THE MECHANISM OF ADJUSTMENT 


inhibits a previous stimulus. We “lose” our appetite: for 
a man who betrays us, a woman who deceives us. A hair 
in the soup shuts down many a salivary gland, a worm in the 
salad ends many a meal. 

Another dog was fed with a painful electric shock at a 
particular spot-on his leg. He learned to like it. With no 
food in sight, his mouth would water with the shock. The 
same shock an inch away from the accustomed spot brought 
pain but not salivary reflex. 

For “dogs” read “human beings”; especially, “children.” 

Destruction of this or that area of the cerebral cortex 
wipes out such conditioned reflexes as are dependent on the 
mechanism of the area destroyed. Destruction of all the 
cortex washes out all conditioned reflexes. 

Conduction paths develop with us. They get well worn 
with use, rooted in habit. Paths that conduct pain impulses 
to central may finally fail to deliver “pain” messages because 
they have grown accustomed to carry such messages to the 
salivary glands or to the gonads; the impulse which should 
have registered as pain sets up or heightens activity in food— 
or sex-hunger mechanism. 

A smile may stimulate a miser to tighten his grasp on his 
purse; but he must be a rank dyspeptic in whom the sound 
of the words: “Let’s eat!” provokes no conditioned reflex 
of salivary glands. 


I9 


We get more energy per fuel unit from our own internal- 
combustion engine than from any engine we can make, but 
our body uses up 75 per cent of it and says nothing about 
it. That only leaves us with a quarter of the energy we 
transform from food for consciousness. But that is enough. 
The vitally important functions of life go on as uncon- 
cernedly as though Nature had never invented nerves nor 
evolved brains. 

321 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


The heart is the star performer. Remove it from the body, 

strip off its nerves: in a nutrient solution it keeps on beating. 
Cut a sliver from it: the sliver keeps on beating. The embryo 
chick’s heart begins to beat before nerves find it. The heart 
is muscle, striated as are ordinary muscles, but involuntary, 
as are the muscles of the viscera and blood vessels. “Invol- 
untary” muscle is automatic: contracts and expands on its 
own. Rhythmic movement is inherent in such tissues. 
_ These internal movements—of heart, countless muscles, 
miles of arteries, arterioles, veins, venules and capillaries, 
and big glands and little glands—all keep plugging away 
in the dark. We cannot will them to stop. Nor by conscious 
effort can we slow down the heart or open the valves that 
control the progress of food through the alimentary canal, 
or stimulate the adrenals to give the blood a few molecules 
of its magic-working hormone. 

“Involuntary”: yes, beyond volition. Automatic: no. 
Man is no automaton; nor is heartbeat or gland activity or 
any process of life “automatic.” Living processes are 
responses to food and oxygen; matter is transferred, energy 
is unleashed. But some living processes have learned their 
lesson so well they seem automatic to us, who must puff and 
blow before we reach the crest. Even if we decide to give 
up and sigh no more, the most we can do is give up conscious- 
ness for a moment: the lungs will sigh out our excess carbon 
dioxide for us. We may cry: “Give us air!” but life learned 
to get air millions of years ago. We may demand our place 
in the sun, but life learned to climb to the sun millions of 
years before man was dreamed of. 

Life is motion. The capacity to move in response to life’s 
needs resides in all living things—has always resided in life, 
is inherent in life. Life must move to keep in touch with the 
air and water and food of life. Man and higher animals 
have taken over some phases of movement—and are “go- 
getters.” They go after water and food. By their sensory 
nerves they can see water and smell food. By their motor 

O22 


THE MECHANISM OF ADJUSTMENT 


nerves they tell their skeletal or striped muscles to go get it; 
sometimes called the peripheral nervous system. But non- 
striated muscle and other “vegetative” organs know what to 
do with air and water and food when brought within reach. 

And if the air, water, or food is bad, they speak up: a 
growl in the stomach, a flutter at the heart, a pain in the 
kidney. When they speak the cortex listens in. We may 
not know what spot or organ is speaking, but we know that 
something has gone wrong. 

We begin to investigate. We find that our heart, seem- 
ingly without nerves, is singularly well connected with the 
nervous system. In fact, no other single organ in the body 
is subject to such nervous control, Why not? Its work 
varies with endless conditions. It knows how to beat, but 
how is it to know when to speed up for a race or slow down 
for sleep? Or whether to beat eighty times a minute for a 
man, or only seventy times because it is working for a 
woman? The heart must have accurate and detailed informa- 
tion if it is to give the best it has. 

It gets this information from two sets of nerves. One is the 
great vagus or pneumogastric, tenth of the twelve trunk-line 
nerves ending in the brain. Its messages slow the heart, 
inhibit action. The other nerve is on another line, only indi- 
rectly connected with central: it is an accelerator, speeds up 
heart action. The two together hold the heart steady as a bit 
holds a horse: “gee” means fast, “haw” slow. 

A man looks me over—scornfully as it were, and says, 
“Oh, gee!”’ The mere look was enough: it was an accelerator, 
my heart beats faster. By what nerve did that look or word 
reach my heart, speed it up, and slip the leash on fighting 
mechanism? A look can do it. One word can transform a 
man as pale as a cool cucumber into a red-faced fury and 
prepare him to take on his weight in wildcats. 

A fighting man or a weeping woman is in a “state of 
mind”—an emotional state. Some dogs and people have 
their “emotions” under control, some are always emoting. 

; 323 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


Emotions are born of biologic necessity: to meet the sudden 
demands when we must run or fight for our lives. To run 
or to fight for life requires reorganization of the body. No 
battleship ever carries out clear-decks-for-action order with 
the speed that the order itself prepares the bodily mechanism 
of the sailors who hear the order. 

Such co-ordinated visceral action takes place through the 
autonomic system. “Autonomic’”’ because in control of activ- 
ities that function with so little reference to the higher brain 
centers they seem automatic. It is not an independent system 
(nothing is, in the body), only an extension of the peripheral, 
and is dominated by the motor nerves of the central nervous 
system. It is a motor system; it makes for speedier action 
in the motor mechanism. 

The cortex may be busy with a poem under a tree. The 
sight of a bull puts cortex out of action and switches on the 
autonomic system. As a result, the poet can now break his 
own record for the hundred-yard dash; or he can climb the 
tree. The cortex is still there—if he can use it. Prepared 
to run and running are different things. Whether he runs 
or climbs, or decides to wait for the bull to make the next 
move, will depend, among other things, on how his emotions 
have been trained, how his reactions to fear, rage, pain, 
hunger, etc., have been conditioned. Even a poet inherits 
life’s capacity for inhibition as well as for excitation. 

The great effector of the body is the skeletal muscular 
system. With this the autonomic system is only indirectly 
connected. It is more directly connected with muscles which 
control the pupil of the eye and change the crystalline lens; 
with glands in the mouth, nose, stomach, and pancreas; with 
most of the arteries, the hair-raiser or goose-flesh muscles, 
and sweat glands; with the bladder and reproductive organs. 

The sixty-odd ganglia or knois of neurons in this system 
presumably form subsidiary centers from which orders are 
relayed from the central system. 

The fact that the autonomic system can be trained is impor- 

324 


THE MECHANISM OF ADJUSTMENT 


tant. It means that a reflex mechanism necessary for brutes 
can be educated to behave as befits intelligence. The manner 
of its education determines whether life is emotion or science. 

The autonomic system is sometimes called sympathetic— 
not because it has any sympathy, but because the system 
connects widely distributed activities. What the system is 
called is less important than the realization that nerves carry 
impulses into and orders from central, and that nerves and 
central function as a unit. The autonomic nerves are simply 
part of that organization. It is not nerves that go to school 
or are trained; it is the individual. 


20 


Ever have cramps—in the sea, a half-mile from the shore? 
It is bad enough in bed; sometimes sends you out on to the 
floor before the cramped muscle unlocks. In the water a 
‘cramp is serious; it may lead to panic. Some one is gen- 
erally lost in a panic. 

Why does the muscle lock? If I knew I could rewrite the 
history of civilization. Whatever cramps are,. fatigue is. 
Fatigue is as yet one of life’s baffling mysteries. Is sleep a 
fatigue-killer? We know when we feel rested and when we 
are tired. What is tired? Why did it get tired? What do 
we feel fatigued with? 

Fatigue is a physiological process, as is living, but it plays 
such an important part in all learning processes and is such 
a responsible factor in human behavior that it must be talked 
about even though it cannot be described. 

In a cramped leg the muscle is locked, contracted. The 
cramp disappears when the muscle unlocks, relaxes. But 
contraction is not the normal state of any muscle—why does 
it lock? Neither is relaxation. Muscles are normally under 
some tension—“tonus.” ‘This renders them more capable of 
response to nerve impulse to contract or relax. But why a 
muscle, quite on its own, as it were, goes into a chronic con- 

320 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


traction, no one knows. Nor is it known why it often 
requires more time for relaxation than for contraction. 

Muscle works best under certain conditions. That at least 
is known. These conditions include hydrogen-ion concentra- 
tion, temperature, and load. Under these conditions its 
energy yields more work and less heat than under poor con- 
ditions. For example, two of us run a mile in six minutes: 
poor time, but that lets me in. At the end, you are cool and 
fresh and I am dripping with sweat. Most of my energy went 
into heat. That is the difference between the labor of a 
trained and an untrained performer. But it does not explain 
why my muscle engines got overheated. 

Nor why, when I begin to tire, my muscles relax more 
and more slowly in proportion to the contraction time. 
Finally, they do not relax at all, although there has been no 
change in the stimulus. This failure is cramp—contracture. 
If the cramp occurs in cold water, it is called “cold con- 
tracture”’; does cold cause the cramp? Otherwise, the cramp 
is called “fatigue contracture.” Does “fatigue” cause the 
swimmer’s cramp? Do lactic acid, CO2, and acid phosphate 
result from fatigue and cause contracture? Not in my legs. 
My toes cramp only when they are tired of being still. That 
cannot be “fatigue.” The more I use them the less they 
fatigue; nor do they then ever cramp. 

Non-striped muscles of viscera may possibly have a 
rhythmic beat of their own, independent of any action of the 
nervous system. But skeletal muscles perform under impulse 
only of nerves. All striped muscles go out of commission 
when their nerves are cut. As they do in deep sleep. Ever 
pick up a sleeping child? It would fall apart if not held 
together by skin and ligaments; complete relaxation of all 
muscles of the motor mechanism. 

Which shows no “fatigue” if there are sufficient rest inter- 
vals between contractions. But after complete fatigue, at 
least two hours are required for recovery. All this has been 
experimentally proved. 

326 


THE MECHANISM OF ADJUSTMENT 


But what is not cleared up is why a repeatedly stimulated 
muscle steadily loses its irritability, relaxes more and more 
slowly, contracts less and less, and finally refuses to contract, 
which fatigues us greatly; or refuses to relax, and that 
cramps us. , 

Is it the nerve ending? Do the nerves which conduct 
impulses to muscles, motor-nerves, have their own discharge 
rhythm? The nerve joins the muscle fiber at the motor end- 
plate. The poison of a plant juice called curare kills that 
plate. A nerve impulse cannot pass that plate if there is 
curare in the system. But the muscle itself, of course, is not 
killed, only removed from nerve impulse, paralyzed. From 
which it is assumed that there is some substance at the motor 
end-plate which transmits impulse from nerve to muscle. 
This substance gets tired or is made tired by a tired muscle. 
And whatever fatigue is, or whatever it is that causes fatigue, 
this substance when fatigued upsets the all-or-none law of 
nerve-impulse conduction: the impulse now passes from nerve 
to muscle with a decrement. 

It must be so. Muscles are all-or-none performers. 
Nerves are all-or-none conductors. A tired muscle is not 
receiving the whole impulse, held up by some substance— 
which gets f atigued, and makes us all tired. 

Here is the point, and a large one: living protoplasm balks 
at endless repetition. Life itself is a response to change. It 
wakes up at dawn, goes to bed with the sun. Sunrise and 
sunset are change. When Johnny’s motor mechanism tires 
with the lawn-mower, let him take a swimming lesson; that 
will rest him. No normal boy suffers fatigue while swim- 
ming; although, if the water is too cold, he might suffer a 
cramp. 

Whether fatigue is COz or a function of lactic acid or 
hydrogen ions, or whatever the substance it affects, the 
presence of fatigue is the sign of enough. It is as though 
life said, Give us a change. Even the brainless reflex knee- 
kick knows enough to tire of repetition. 

327 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


ma| 


Knowledge of the human nervous system is miles from 
complete or satisfactory. Whatever “mind” is, the mind of 
a human depends on nervous control. When a nerve is cut, 
the mind of the part beyond the cut vanishes; when the spinal 
cord is severed, life itself vanishes, and with it the last trace 
of mind—even ‘though excitability remain a few hours longer 
in the members. 

Living matter is excitable; that is its nature. The nervous 
system is the mechanism through which excitation is con- 
ducted; its nature is such that excitation is speeded up and 
is transmitted over considerable distances. This may involve 
the transport of electrons. But whether by this means or by 
chemical change, the facts of transmission can be observed 
in any biological laboratory. 

The nervous system as a whole has come to have what 
amounts to a monopoly of the excitable nature and trans- 
missible quality of all the other cells of our body. 

We may sleep through a hair-cut—so long as the hairs are 
cut. Let some be pulled, and we come to. Each hair is 
rooted in a nerve; the nerve cries out when excited. If many 
are pulled, we change barbers. Which means that the 
nervous system functions for the entire organism, knits it 
into one individual. It is the mechanism of integration. 
Through this mechanism individual behavior, individual 
response, is made possible. 

Our nervous system, then, is more than mere mechanism 
of adjustment to environment, more than something which 
has excitation and transmission capacity; it is itself the 
product of such adjustments as have been made, the up-to- 
date product of the original reaction system that began with 
life. It has become increasingly complex. That complexity 
is the visible expression of that relation to environment on 
which all individual existence is founded and which starts 
with all individual existence. 

328 


THE MECHANISM OF ADJUSTMENT 


Our individual existence starts with an egg which responds 
to environmental relations. Our nervous system, at any one 
moment of our life, is the conditioned product of the 
responses that have been made up to that moment. These 
responses have been made on behalf of an individual. This 
or that reaction may seem only part response, but all 
responses are individual: any particular part response suf- 
ficed for the whole organism. The organism of billions of 
cells can act as a unit because its nervous system accepts that 
office. 

The organism is the individual—man. The cells of his 
body live their individual lives: they feed and breathe as 
individual cells. But they are welded together for a common 
purpose—the unified body they serve. The nervous system 
permits of individual action in that unified body. It thereby 
performs two groups of functions: “the physiological adjust- 
ment of the body as a whole to its environment and the 
correlation of the activities of its organs among themselves; 
the so-called higher functions of the cerebral cortex related to 
the conscious life.” 

As Herrick points out, our own conscious experience has 
nothing to work with except the sensory data which is trans- 
mitted through the lower brain centers to the cerebral cortex. 
Consciousness, then, is action of a kind in the cerebral cortex: 
the materials of consciousness are the contents of sense, 
sensory data. 

We eat and sleep and snore and dream and work and play, 
hunt and fish, get rich and get poor, and in short do and think 
the usual and unusual things that men do and think. Some- 
times we are conscious, sometimes we are not. Consciousness 
is an organic mode. 

Excitation is movement of ions—charges of electricity. A 
tired muscle shows an increase of its normal hydrogen-ion 
concentration. Does this account for the failure of the nerve 
to conduct excitation in extreme fatigue? A nerve conducts 
an excitation; time must elapse before it can again be stimu- 

329 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


lated: about 1/100th of a second. During this interval the 
ions are probably restored to their original positions and 
other changes that occurred reversed. 

There comes a time when we cannot reverse—nor change 
our mind; the reaction-system cannot restore our equilibrium; 
the motor mechanism cannot be relieved of the waste products 
as rapidly as they are formed. Stimuli which disturb the 
equilibrium of the physico-chemical reactions necessary for 
life cease to be stimuli. Changes in ion concentrations may 
disturb the equilibrium but no longer serve as stimuli to 
excite changes necessary to meet the next upset. “I will’ is 
a fine slogan, but the kinetic energy which kicks down doors 
_ and tunnels mountains is never released until the mechanism 
is in such position that the potential energy is there. Our 
potential energy is force. There must be equilibrium back of 
“T will.” Back of each heartbeat is a reaction which restores 
its equilibrium: it is always dynamic—potential. It can 
reverse. 

With change to which we cannot reply, to which we can 
make no compensation, death comes to heartbeat and to con- 
sciousness. The protoplasm coagulates; death is an irreversi- 
ble change. 

The egg by which life is transmitted is a clean slate; the 
record of change has been erased. At birth the recording 
process begins all over again. With adult life most of the 
irreversible changes have been made; we have reached 
dynamic equilibrium. 

Do we do it? Can we explain the nature of our reactions? 
Something is known of the nature of water and many of its 
reactions have been described, but none explained. Man is 
not quite all water. How much of the remainder is hydro- 
gen ions, catalyzers, and drugs, is not yet known. Nor is it 
quite known what fires our consciousness; the processes of 
chemical combustion in living things are not perfectly under- 
stood. But it is certain that all brain work involves change 
or metabolism in brain tissue. Metabolism in the nervous 

330 


ee a ee es 


THE MECHANISM OF ADJUSTMENT 


system is yet to be worked out in the biochemist’s laboratory. 
When it is, we shall know more about memory and conscious- 
ness than we do now. But enough is known to give us a 
working hypothesis and to rob memory of some of its 
mystery. 

Neuron metabolism is presumably not essentially unlike 
that of other reacting protoplasms, but because neurons are 
especially organized for conduction and are highly irritable, 
it seems reasonable that they should not only be architec- 
turally unlike other cells, but should also be chemically dif- 
ferent. They are. In their neurofibrils is presumably the 
substance which facilitates conduction of impulses; their 
chromophilic substance presumably is the explosive in 
excitation. 

The chromophilic substance is an iron-containing nucleo- 
protein and is found only in the larger neurons and dendrites, 
never in the axons. It is presumably not concerned in the 
general metabolism of nerve cells; it does presumably con- 
tribute to the rapid liberation of much energy during excita- 
tion. Herrick finds a rough analogy with fire in gunpowder 
and in a lump of coal. The coal burns only at the surface 
in oxygen; the gunpowder, once brought to the proper tem- 
perature, liberates oxygen internally, so that the combustion 
can take place simultaneously throughout the mass. 

During intense activity or in extreme fatigue the chromo- 
philic substance seems to disappear, to be used up; when the 
neuron is at rest it reappears. In a way, its action suggests 
that of an enzyme. For the present it may be regarded as a 
catalyzer of neuron energy liberation. It furnishes the kick 
back of brainstorms and the explosive in flare-ups; it serves 
as a storehouse for the release of energy in long-sustained 
mental work. 

But a catalyzer is not used up; no more, presumably, is 
the chromophilic substance. During rest or inactivity it 
reorganizes, as does an enzyme; it is free to enter into a new 
complex. Like enzymes, its action is both analytic and 

331 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


synthetic. It is conceivable that every action of the chromo- 
philic substance leads to a structural change in the proto- 
plasm of the neuron itself. The neuron, therefore, is not 
what it was before. It has learned a lesson; it will react 
more easily the next time. There will be less internal resist- 
ance, as Herrick puts it. “The change in the ‘set’ of the 
reacting substance makes a repetition of the discharge easier. 
It may be transitory or long enduring. This is organic 
memory. The same principle may work out in modified form 
in the cerebral cortex in connection with conscious memory.” 

One other point of great importance. Theoretically, if not 
actually, every neuron in the body is in contact with every 
other neuron in the body; but presumably no one neuron is 
in direct contact with any other neuron, at every junction is 
a synapse. This junction stops impulses or it lets them by. 
It is modified by what it does; it is “impressionable to indi- 
vidual experiences.” The real importance of this fact will 
appear later. The point to be made here is that simple 
atmospheric vibrations of certain lengths may strike my ear 
drum and be conducted by my auditory nerve as such, but 
when these vibrations have been translated by my cortex and 
found to mean a word of five letters having an odor like a 
polecat, my entire body may suddenly be mobilized for 
action. More, I shall be extremely conscious at the time and 
a different man for the remainder of my life. And all 
because the different protoplasms of my body are knit 
together by correlation mechanisms of varying degrees of 
complexity, all integrated into one mechanism which adjusts 
me and with which I adjust myself. 

And as for consciousness. Sometimes I am conscious, 
sometimes I am not. During sleep or at rest, the brain is 
probably in a state of dynamic equilibrium. Some stimulus 
disturbs this equilibrium; where the stimulus ends will 
depend on synaptic resistance and neuron thresholds. If the 
stimulus reaches the cerebral cortex, I shall probably be 

332 


THE MECHANISM OF ADJUSTMENT 


conscious of it—it will then be “conscious activity, the kind 
of consciousness depending on the kind of discharge.” 

When psychology has become quite divorced from psyche 
and gets in bed with living beings we shall be able to throw 
the word “consciousness” into the discard—along with 
“mind” and “memory.” Human behavior then will be on a 
scientific basis and not a branch of literature or philosophic 
or religious speculation. “Mind” will give way to personal- 
ity, “consciousness” in general to specfic exhibitions of 
learned behavior, and “memory” to the calling out of some 
part of the individual’s striped or unstriped muscle-tissue 
organization. ; 

Do I remember something? Only if I can react it with my 
manual, verbal, or visceral mechanism as the case may be. 
Am I conscious? Only when the higher brain centers are 
stimulated to activity. Have I a mind? Well I am alive— 
and must keep on making adjustments until I am dead. And 
that adjustment ends my personality and any further be- 
havior as a living being. 

This conception of a dynamically active cortex is helpful 
in understanding several phenomena of general psychologic 
interest—sleep, dreams, consciousness, etc. In sound sleep 
it is presumably in equilibrium. When we are widest awake, 
its equilibrium presumably is quite upset; changes go on 
until equilibrium is restored. 

But in this connection Watson’s warning against over- 
emphasis of the réle of the nervous system is useful. 

Every sensory structure can, when stimulated, excite a 
- segmental reflex, a reflex involving neighboring segments, or 
a reflex involving practically the whole central nervous sys- 
tem. Herein lies the neurological basis for the complex 
types of instinctive and habitual reflex acts. Central affords 
a system of connection between sense organs and glands and 
muscles. Interrupt the connection, the organism no longer 
acts as whole; some phase of the behavior pattern drops out. 
But, in stooping to tie a shoe, for example, or jumping in 

333 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE BUMAN BEINGS 


fright following a sudden explosion, the tonus of every 
muscle, striped and unstriped, in the body, is changed, and 
the glands become activated. Action takes place only with 
bones, which means more food, strain on the heart, elimina- 
tion of waste, etc. While a simple eye-hand co-ordination 
brings a well-ordered and integrated response from the whole 
organism, such response only takes place with central, but 
it can not take place without action in heart, bones, glands, 
and muscles. 

As to the nature of the processes due to change in equi- 
librium, Herrick assumes, for example, that the irradiation 
of a nervous discharge into the visual area of the cortex 
through the association tracts will be determined by the 
existing pathways at the moment open. Which pathways 
are open will be determined by previous experience (facili- 
tating transmission) and by stimuli of other senses, which 
will reinforce, inhibit, or modify the visually excited 
nervous discharges, partly by particular patterns of memory 
vestiges in the association centers, partly by temporary states 
of fatigue, lassitude, interest, etc—“and it may be by count- 
less other factors.” But, cortical equilibrium having been 
disturbed (by a withering look or a trim ankle), cortical 
activity will continue until a new equilibrium is established— 
“by motor discharge, by fatigue with no practical outcome, 
by the fabrication of a new pattern of cortical activity or by 
a new enduring ‘set’ of the reacting system which will modify 
all subsequent activity of this system and may appear in con- 
sciousness as an idea, a judgment, a decision, a purpose, or 
an ideal.” 

Consciousness is like life: there are criteria, manifesta- 
tions, of living things; but, as there is no life in general, so 
there is no consciousness in general. There are conscious 
modes. ‘The reaction of ameba to vital change is one con- 
scious mode, or form of consciousness. Call it instinct, 
impulse—what you will; but it is a definite kind or form of 
energy transformer. In man, this energy becomes an object 

334 


i 
if 


THE MECHANISM OF ADJUSTMENT 


of observation because it influences other centers of energy 
transformation. I have the energy to do several things at the 
same time—even to be conscious that the robins are greeting 
the dawn and that it is time for me to take the air. The fact 
of that consciousness is a factor in my behavior and I adjust 
myself accordingly. Any other animal with my kind of 
adjusting mechanism and with my experience would do the 
same, 


is ©) 
os) 
Fe 


CHAPTER VI 


ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


1. A Stork’s-eye View of the Baby. 2. Instinctive Behavior. 3. Organizing 
the Kinesthetic Sense. 4. The Reflex Basis of Habits. 5. Play and Imitation. 
6. The Laws of Habit Formation. 7. Instinctive Emergency Behavior. 8. The 
Fear-Hate Organization. 9. Childhood’s “Unconscious” Mind. I0. The 
Habit of Language. JJ. Verbalized Organization. 12. Adjustment by Thought 
and by Words. 13. Learning and Remembering. 14. The Changing Situation. 
15. Positive and Negative Adaptations. 16. How Habits Are Broken. 17. The 


Habit of Sleep. 18. “Prophecy lies in... ‘I have dreamed.’” 19. Learning 
to Know. 20. Knowing and Believing. 21. The Individuality of Response. 
1 


THE stork leaves the baby and flies away home. The baby: 


knows how to live; all it has to do now is to learn to behave. 
It can learn many things; it will be expected to learn certain 
things. It is fitted for life; it will be trained to fit into this or 
that kind of life. It has an inheritance; it will be asked to 
invest this inheritance in the coin of the realm. Its potenti- 
alities are unknown; they will now be tested and given rein 
to develop or checked by the bit of custom. In short, every 
baby is born at a specific time into a specific community with 
definite ways of living and set opinions of those who do not 
live that way; to that life the baby is expected to learn to 
adjust itself—or, as it is sometimes put, to become an 
ornament! 

How does it do it? 

How does the stork know its way home? We do not know. 
We know how to find our way home—and what happens when 
we arrive home and cannot find the keyhole, or when we 
promise to be home at one and arrive at four. Even a bee 
knows its way home—and makes for it in a “bee line.” 

336 


et hints, 


ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


Marked terns carried by Watson in a hooded cage on a 
steamer from their nesting grounds off the coast of Florida 
to Galveston, returned home in less than a week across the 
six-hundred-mile trackless waters of the Gulf of Mexico. 

Uncanny? Only because we cannot describe tern behavior 
in the familiar terms of human psychology. We only know 
that with this homing instinct birds get home; we do not yet 
know the nature of the stimulus, whether one or many, or 
how this stimulus so excites the bird that it makes its 
“uncanny” response. But this we can say: any bird born with 
a reaction mechanism that is not responsive to life-or-death 
excitations will never grow up to be proud of its offspring. 

An eel travels down the Rhine to the sea, and keeps right 
on until she reaches the Azores; lays her eggs; dies. Her 
progeny return to the Rhine. Salmon are as “uncanny”; 
from the sea they enter fresh-water rivers and ascend far 
inland; deposit their eggs; die. They are in such hurry to 
make this journey to the grave that they do not stop on the 
way to eat. Young salmon return to the briny deep to grow 
up, and find their way back up the very same river to pay 
their debt to their kind and to their nature. 

During evolution, life has encountered endless situations 
and has learned—sometimes only indifferently well—to meet 
these situations in endless ways. Some of these ways are 
still miles beyond us—as Huxley remarked of his crayfish 
after studying it all his life. We see the responses—and too 
often interpret them in terms of our own likes and dislikes, 
pains and pleasures, work and play. 

We think we know why we travel a thousand miles to die in 
the old home, and how we find it. But why should a poor fish 
of a salmon go hungry for weeks, travel a thousand miles, 
breast endless rapids and climb waterfalls, just to polish off 
life in the old home? It seems stupid! It is: it has nearly 
been the death of salmon. Think of all the salmon ever 
canned—all because they insist on going home to die! 

We see the responses; we dissect out the reflex arcs of 

337 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


nervous mechanism and distinguish receptors from effectors: 
the behavior still baffles us, because we have only just begun 
to try to interpret living beings as dynamically excitable 
organisms with a capacity to respond to excitations which to 
them have life-or-death value, and which transmit to their 
offspring both excitable structure and capacity for response. 

We do not know what impels salmon to climb to lakes in 
mountains, eels to cross seas, birds to migrate halfway round 
the world, amebz to chase their brothers, or men to beat their 
wives. We do not even know much about impulses. We do 
know that some things, some situations, and some people, 
excite us—sometimes more than we are willing to admit or 
is good for us. We respond: we may clean up or go broke. 

But whatever it is that salmon, stork, or ameba responds 
to, we may be certain that the response is an answer to a 
question: is it poison or food—shall I eat it or leave it alone? 
Friend or foe—and if foe, shall I run or fight? And, in 
higher organisms, does she love me or does she not? 

These are the three big things in life. 

Plants and animals answer these questions, each according 
to its kind. One’s poison is another’s food; one’s deadliest 
enemy is another’s life-saver. Each has its own specific 
reaction system—range of capacity to act, range of capacity 
to learn. In short, to each species of animals the world is 
thus and so; to that world it must respond thus and so; the 
individuals of the species are born attuned to the world in 
which they must sink or swim. 

The baby our stork left is in the same boat. Only, if we 
are to understand it, two things must be borne in mind. 

Every species of higher organisms, both in plant and ani- 
mal world, has its own specific life cycle. A certain cater- 
pillar eats and excretes the livelong day to turn into a butter- 
fly which lays her eggs while in the cocoon and dies before 
she has eaten a meal or flown a foot. A colt dropped to 
earth rises up to trot off with its mother. “Infancy” may be 
a minute, it may be years. “Adult” life may rise at sunset 

338 


ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


from an imago in the water on the wings of an ephemera, to 
mate, drop her eggs, and die before sunrise. 

The world into which we are born has little relation to the 
world we were evolved to be born into: it is a man-made 
world, full of whispers and innuendoes, dark corners and 
bright lights, selfishness and greed, stupidity and cruelty, and 
many charitable organizations. In course of time these 
excrescences will be seen for what they are. Then the years 
of infancy can be so spent that the adult can make the most of 
his capacity to mend his environment, instead of being so 
misspent that he must use all his energy to fit into it or escape 
from it. 

Eagles have nests, and coyotes holes, but a lamb has no 
place to lay its head except alongside mother, and she must 
keep in touch with grass. The lamb begins to jump about 
before it is a day old: it may have to run for its life that same 
day. Having frolicked fleetness of foot into its legs, it is 
prepared for the main business of life—tearing off grass’ 
between gums of upper and teeth of lower jaw. 

The baby the stork leaves can neither fight nor run, but 
in its innate instinctive nature are biologically useful modes 
of response to the two big crises which confront a human 
infant. The response to hunger is one. Back of this 
response is a mechanism which works like a charm. Sucking 
begins when the lips are stimulated, even by an empty rubber 
nipple. Food in mouth leads to the next step in this reflex 
chain—swallowing. The reflex chain ends with the stimulus 
of afull stomach. All this is instinctive behavior. The reflex 
is the simplest and most persistent mechanism of instinctive 
acts. The two represent a primitive response in a predeter- 
mined direction. 

Nor does the newborn have to learn to “throw up” a meal 
or spit it out, or to lick, hiccough, sneeze, breathe, or make a 
face—at quinine, for example. Or draw up its leg when 
tickled. These reflex responses are instinctive acts, written 
into its inheritance. 

339 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


In short, we are born with much valuable knowledge picked 
up during the millions of years we have been living; but we 
are not born with the knowledge where food and water are 
to be found, or with a motor which would take us there if 
we knew. 

Which means that our viscera know how to live; our motor 
mechanism does not know how to carry the viscera to the 
things it must have to live on. And we are infants-in-arms 
until our motor mechanism learns to perform that service for 
us. When that mechanism learns to go after food as well as 
the viscera know how to handle food, we are going concerns, 
we have some sense. The first sense we acquire is movement 
sense, kinesthetic organization. 


2 


Animals must eat or die; must breed or their kind dies 
with them. Their structure and their nature make them 
responsive to these two urges at periods also determined by 
their nature and by their development. It is also in their 
nature that their structure will enable them throughout their 
life cycle to make adjustment to vital stimuli. 

The higher the animal life, the less set are the inborn 
responses, the more flexible the adjustments. A monkey is 
interested in more things than is a cat or a dog: it has a more 
excitable nature. It learns more rapidly. 

The response mechanism and the response repertoire will 
be conditioned by the world the animal faces. The lion 
learns to jump through a hoop of fire—a situation the lion 
at birth did not confront. A monkey learns to pick a lock 
or untie a knot. But it is enough for the monkey at birth to 
know how to eat and how to hang on to mother: she will pro- 
vide the meals and carry the baby along with her. But it is 
also necessary that the baby know when it is in pain and have 
some means of letting mother know. 

With man, “helpless infancy” reaches its maximum dura- 

340 


ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


tion. Whatever instinct is, man has less need of it than a flea 
or even a monkey. A monkey at six knows everything; man 
at six has just started to school. But, like the monkey, he is 
born with enough to get by the first day. 

A wasp leaves its cell fit to fly, sting, and get food. That 
is instinctive behavior. It has nothing to do but live; nothing 
to learn but death. The human newborn yawns and looks 
about. It does not know what it will have to do. Why 
instincts when there are mothers to teach it habits? 

The mason wasp (mud dauber) is not so clever with her 
stinger as is the saddler with his awl; she does not always 
reach the spinal ganglion of the spider she stings; she may 
kill it, which then will be no good for wasp’s larve. But if 
she does reach that ganglion, the spider is paralyzed and will 
live for days. She drags it home, lays an egg on it, and seals 
ege and spider in a mud tomb. The egg hatches, the larva 
eats the spider, and digs out, leaving the empty shell of the 
spider’s body within the tomb. The wasp’s stinger was ready- 
made and her stinging of spider an inherited habit, 
instinctive. The saddler has to learn to use his awl. The 
awl finally functions like a machine because innumerable 
reflex arcs bound like a chain-gang have learned to work 
together. The saddler can then use his mind for other things. 

Habit is the most important element in human behavior. 
Any animal that cannot form a habit must depend on in- 
stinct. Instincts make for routine and stereotyped behavior. 
The greater the capacity to form new habits, the wider is the 
possible range of behavior. This range in man is so great 
that stereotyped thought and action are evidence of an ab- 
normal mind. 

Human culture is back of human habits. Human nature 
is back of human instincts. For example, suppose we are 
about to enlist or buy life insurance. Are we physically fit? 
The doctor puts us in a chair, asks us to cross our legs, and 
raps the patellar ligament just below the knee. Our foot flies 
out. We smile: we used to play that trick on each other when 

: 341 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


we were boys. What can the old knee-kick trick have to do 
with fitness for military service or life insurance? Or with 
instincts? 

Much. The rap on the ligament was carried by a sensory 
nerve to the spinal cord, from spinal cord by motor nerve to 
the quadriceps femoris muscle (in which the knee-cap is em- 
bedded) ending in the tibia. This muscle contracted; the 
foot kicked out. Spinal cord O. K. No paresis, locomotor 
ataxia, or such. 

Every rap on that ligament is followed by a knee jerk. 
It is a reflex act and implies a definite reflex arc; such an arc 
exists; we have countless such arcs at birth. It is not learned 
or acquired or under control of the will. A ray of light 
strikes a newborn’s eye: the eye may or may not close, but the 
pupil will contract, as will ours under similar stimulus. That 
contraction is a reflex act, instinctive: we could not help it. 

We often say, “I simply couldn’t help myself!” It is the 
gospel truth; by no conscious effort are we ever complete 
master of ourselves. We may gaze in open-eyed delight at 
a blinding flash of lightning and never turn a hair at the most 
deafening burst of thunder, but there is a limit of control in 
all human flesh; it is the nature of flesh to be sensitive, of 
nerves to transmit sensation. 

To blink at lightning and jump at thunder and pull at the 
nipple and swallow food and relieve the bladder, etc., are all 
instinctive activities. Because they are more complex than 
mere knee-kick, pupil contraction, and other reflexes, they 
are called instincts. Instincts are compound reflexes. If we 
could analyze them, we should find an arc for each of the 
component reflexes. 

Instinctive behavior is unlearned behavior; it functions 
with the first adequate stimulus; it is common to man and to 
many higher animals; it is complex; it is accompanied by but 
not dependent on consciousness; it is explicit or implicit; it © 
is modifiable. 

Go to the ant, sluggard! is no advice for any human being. 

342 


ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


The ant is a slave to its instincts. It can only react in a 
certain way, predetermined at birth, working on an inherited 
preformed mechanism. Requiring no experience, it gains 
none. The ant is nature’s masterpiece of quick and accurate 
uniform behavior, as predetermined as an oak tree. Its 
nervous system is a ladder; it must climb that ladder. Go to 
a monkey, is better advice. No Primate is a slave, unless en- 
slaved by man. Ants have been living the same life for 
millions of years. A monkey lives more in a year than all 
the ants have lived since ants evolved. 

Our nervous system is no ladder; it is built around a tube. 
It has plenty of reflex arcs, but it is surmounted by a brain 
whose big business is to learn and to profit by experience. 
The baby’s spinal cord is largely organized at birth, but its 
big brain is a clean slate. There is nothing known it cannot 
learn. With man, plastic behavior reaches its highest point. 

We do not inherit instincts, but an instinctive mode of vege- 
tative and reproductive reactions; also an instinctive activity 
which by the nature of the stimulus says “yes” or “no,” a 
positive or a negative response. With such activity, we can 
learn to walk and pull the cat’s tail; we can form habits. 
We bump our head against the table; our next response to 
table is conditioned. We pull the wrong cat’s tail; our habit 
of response to cats’ tails is conditioned. All our responses 
are conditioned. That is the way we learn to behave. We 
do not require instincts; we can acquire habits. If we get 
set in them, we can forget our brains and live like ants. 

Add it up: instincts are inherited habits. Have we more 
than a chimpanzee? We cannot say. But we can say that 
both of us have enough to start out in life; if not, we are 
defective and do not go far. We can also say that our inherit- 
ance of reflex arcs exceeds that of the chimpanzee by several 
ounces of neurons. As a consequence, we have more nervous 
machinery in general, more neurons to load, more paths to 
carry the load. 

But the fundamental difference between man’s and chim- 

343 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


panzee’s inheritance is in parents. Once a chimpanzee, al- 
ways a chimpanzee; but a man may become a skunk or a 
saint. Think of all the kinds of people you know! 

Man’s inherited habit-to-live can be modified into thousands 
of ways of living. We do not inherit habits of shaving, wear- 
ing kimonos, three meals a day, plug hats, skyscrapers, ab- 
horrence of pork, four wives, faith in Sunday schools, or 
belief in higher education for women. We do inherit parents 
who do not want us to disgrace them and who do their best 
to bring us up in the way we ought to go. 

Which means that human inheritance varies from age to 
age and cradle to cradle. Little the newborn cares about a 
silver spoon in his mouth—he inherited the habit of respond- 
ing to an empty stomach; or whether the roof over his head 
is copper or thatch—he inherited the habit of crawling in 
out of the wet. 

To describe human adjustments in terms of instincts or 
analyze specific human behavior—or our own consciousness 
—into instinctive acts, is to stir the mud. Human culture 
is the accumulated responses of the man-animal to his man- 
made environment. It accumulates, it varies, because man 
can and does talk. This seems a handicap at times, but in the 
long run it has had enormous consequences. Without speech 
as an organized tool of exchanging, acquiring, and trans- 
mitting experiences, human culture is inconceivable. 

Life learns. An ameba probably learns new tricks not 
inherent in original protoplasm. Man also must learn by 
experience. But if you tell me “The water’s cold,” or “That’s 
a toadstool,” it saves me time. It is this enormous as- 
semblage of others’ experiences in the form of objects and’ 
descriptions which makes human culture what it is and man’s 
birthright to-day what it is. 

An engineer will build an airplane in less time than it Hor 
him to learn to drive his first nail. But in an entire lifetime 
ne could not alone assemble the materials for the airplane, 

344 


ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


or, without benefit of accumulated knowledge, learn how to 
make one nail. 

We inherit no nail-driving habit. We do inherit a motor 
mechanism which feels good when functioning. We took our 
first lesson in driving a nail when we banged the rattle on the 
side of the crib. Later, stimuli of nails, hammer, soft pine, 
an environment holding other stimuli to activity; countless 
reflex arcs, some already learned in responses to such stimuli; 
thumb smashed, probably! but the nail is finally driven. 
And more nails, and more, until finally the carpenter drives 
nails from force of habit like an instinct. 


3 


We learn to skate in summer and to swim in winter, said 
James. He meant that our gradually rising curve of learning 
reaches a crest—and stops for a while. During summer, we 
consolidate all that we learned during winter. With the 
next winter, we start from a new level. It is even more true 
that we learn both to skate and to swim when we learn to 
walk, just as we have made progress in learning Chinese when 
we have learned English. But to learn Chinese, or to skate, 
or to dance on our toes, we must start early; our muscles 
soon get set intheir ways. _ 

It is the first walk that is the hardest. The steps we acquire 
later in life are mere child’s play compared with the first step 
the child learns to make. Balancing the body on one foot on 
a wire rope is only possible because we learned first to bal- 
ance the body on a ball a half-inch in diameter. We speak 
of such complex acts as tennis, typewriting, piano playing, 
etc. They are complex, but the complex and difficult part 
was learned by the time we could walk across the room and 
put a finger in the cat’s eye. 

Do we learn these acts, or are they innate responses that 
appear in due time? We know that the newborn’s legs are 
not only weak, but are not yet shaped for an upright gait, 

345 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


and that its spine has not yet taken on human curves; legs 
and spine grow human. Several years elapse before they are 
entirely human in character. But they are human enough to 
walk on within twelve or fifteen months. 

The response to the first pin-prick is not the simple reflex 
of hand going to the spot that is injured. Rather: random, 
aimless, uncontrolled, uncoérdinated, unadjusted movements 
of body, arms, legs. Possibly driving the pin in deeper. Con- 
trast these vain random motor-mechanism movements with 
the prompt and coordinated pattern-reaction to pain or nox- 
ious stimulus; or that of visceral and glandular systems to 
pain of pin-prick or to any pain or to any stimulus which the 
little mite of protoplasm interprets as deadly. 

It may seem much more important that the infant should 
know where and how to put its hand on that pin than it is to 
get so upset it loses its appetite—and possibly its dinner. 
And the madder it gets, the less likely it is to find the pin. 
But man was not evolved in a thorn tree, nor were there pins 
when the human adjustment system was perfected. Nor has 
man yet progressed to the point where he is born adapted to 
“all the comforts of a home” and the tenseness of civiliza- 
tion. We have to learn to walk and to train our hands and 
fingers in such space and to such keys as our fate allots us. 

Random and uncoordinated movements represent the range 
of our motor mechanism inheritance at birth; except, of 
course, the grasping reflex. That comes with us. Many new- 
borns can support their body by either hand; by a hand so 
tiny and by an arm so frail that it does not appear strong 
enough—and does not know enough—to support a half-pint 
bottle. 

Swimming is not an inheritance. The newborn is afraid of 
water, and if introduced to it under painful circumstances 
may carry the fear for life. 

The earliest body movements are chiefly of an avoiding 
nature. A three-days-old infant’s nose was lightly pinched. 
It began to strike out with its hand. In eighteen seconds the 

346 


Se 


ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


hand found its mark: it struck the experimenter’s hand. On 
the second trial it found his hand in two seconds. By the 
fourth day the infant’s hand had learned its lesson: it could 
at once strike the experimenter’s hand. 

The newborn can turn its eyes toward the light. Not until 
days later can it fix its eyes on a light or move them with a 
moving light. It will reach out for a lighted candle. But 
only after 150 or more trials has it learned to direct its hand 
to the flame. A few trials suffice for the infant’s hand to 
avoid the flame. The more flame the hand discovers, the less 
the hand tries to discover. For “flame” substitute “stick 
of candy.” 

These early months lead to simple eye-hand co-ordinations. 
But only after long and repeated experiment can the little 
hand or finger be direvted to the spot which stimulates the 
eye. So with body and leg movements. Their actions become 
definite and sharp only after months of trial and error. Mean- 
while the entire motor-machinery grows in size and in strength. 

Every movement that comes under control is a movement 
learned, useful in the next adjustment movement. Muscles, 
tendons, ligaments, become codrdinated. Thus habits of 
motion and movement are formed. A few years later these 
will be put to use in making pies or playing marbles, or 
shooting a rifle, or chopping wood. 

Hundreds of muscles. What can they not learn to do? 
But in all this learning countless little habits are formed: 
habits because learned. A time comes when the youngster 
can pick up a glass of water from the table and carry it to 
his mouth; over one hundred muscles involved. Each per- 
forms at the right time, does just the needed work and no 
more. ‘The levers involved! The wonderful codrdination! 
No machine works so perfectly as the body machine can. 

The great, the essential, the refined, the delicate move- 
ments are learned within three years. That little mechanism 
grows up with us. Throughezt life we call upon it to run, to 

347 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


swim, to climb, to dance, to jump, to “hold ’em,” to “knock | 


"em stiff.” 

Movements and motions of the body mechanism can be 
learned because muscles, tendons, and joint surfaces are 
themselves sources of impulses: receptors, sense organs. 
Our brain can thereby organize our body. We walk along 
new gravel beds, plowed fields, dusty roads, sandy beaches, 
or city pavements, without stumbling or missing a step. We 
kick a cat, but not a brick. Nor a hat on April first: we 
kicked that hat once—it had a brick under it. We learned. 
By experience we learn to walk through plowed fields, through 
grass, ashes, leaves. Training, learning, habits of the motor 
mechanism. : 

With this kinesthetic organization we sense hard stone, soft 
grass, heavy lead, the resistance of water, bushes, walls. If 
we learn to sleep on a feather bed, a hair mattress is as 
“hard as a board.” The city-bred boy stumbles all over a 
farm: his kinesthetic sense has something to learn. Water 
looks soft: it feels as hard as rock if we dive in flat. Only 
by experience do we learn whether it is safe to jump from 
a height upon a pile of leaves or a load of hay. By falling 
off a bicycle we learn enough to stay on. 

This kinesthetic organization is of enormous importance. 
It carries us through life if we have built it up well, giving 
us time to choose. The individual who is always stubbing his 
toe, spraining his ankle, stumbling over others’ feet, running 
into doors and sharp corners, falling downstairs, picking up 
hot pokers, barking his shins, and “didn’t know it was so 
‘far’ or “so high” or “‘so hard” or “so deep” or “so steep” or 
“so slippery,” has poorly developed kinesthetic sense: he is 
inexperienced in movement or without a full complement of 
kinesthetic habits. 

The motor mechanism starts to school the day the baby 
is born. And every mother knows that it is “not still a min- 
ute.” Within thirty months it has fallen down a thousand 
times; walked or backed or bumped into everything avail- 

348 


ia a Ut ee a ee ee ee es 


ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


able; handled everything greasy, sticky, smooth, rough, hot, 
cold, dry, wet, hard and soft, within reach. Falls out of 
crib and chair again and again. Finally learns to climb in 
and out. Bumps its nose, its head, its shins; gets its fingers 
caught in doors. Learns that it can slide down the banisters 
and the cellar door and climb up a rope but not a lace curtain. 

Very busy months these. There are not enough words to 
describe all the motor nabits a healthy youngster learns within 
thirty months. 

The kinesthetic sense only gets into consciousness when 
something goes wrong. With our motor mechanism we swim 
along, unconscious of the unending and beautifully codrdi- 
nated movements of bony levers worked by myriads of micro- 
scopic muscle engines. Then, without warning, cramps! We 
are suddenly conscious of our body machine. Pain anywhere 
in muscles, joints, tendons, ligaments, brings our body 
machine home to us. 


4. 


Practice makes perfect. Even a car “drives” better after 
the first thousand miles. And as for the driver himself! At 
the end of the first day he ever drove a car he was a wreck. 
For two reasons. 

Fear lest he wreck the car: too emotional. He suffered 
enough in anticipation to lose a dozen cars, several legs, ribs, 
eyes, lives. Other fears under his belt moved him deeply: 
was it safe, any possibility of its blowing up, would the gas 
hold out, etc.? He did not know his car; it was a great un- 
known; the unknown is always a threat. He did not know his 
road, nor its manners and its customs, its curves and its 
grades. The new way is always a threat: what is around the 
corner ? 

The other reason. His own motor mechanism was tired 
all over. Throughout the day his muscles had been tense, 
taut as fiddle strings, keyed up for emergency action. His 

349 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


eyes saw too much, his ears heard too much, and his nose was 
on the qui vive for hot boxes, burning rubber, scorched 
grease. His control over his car’s brakes and gears was 
better than over his own. It was as though he were running 
his body on high with the emergency brakes on. More than 
that: his hands and feet had not learned to codrdinate. To 
do one thing with one foot and quite a different thing with the 
other, steer with one hand and work a brake or gear-shift with 
the other, is a learned operation. He had not yet learned it. 
He could do it, but at an awful price. 

Now he drives three hundred miles a day; is as fresh as a 
daisy; has a good time, sees the country, talks his hat off, 
smokes a dozen cigars. Does not give his car a thought the 
whole day. He is as automatic as his engine. 

Same car, same road, same driver. And the same process 
in every act of learning, beginning with the act of standing 
up or the first walk in life. We have time for the high spots 
in life if we have learned how to cross the routine valleys 
by force of habit. 

Watch a small boy at his first copybook. Face screwed up 
in a knot, brow furrowed, mouth open, tongue out, one fist 
clutching the desk, the other the pencil, legs tied up tight. 
Every muscle in that boy’s body is engaged in learning to 
write. Finally he learns to write with one arm, and can 
smile and wink and let his legs go to sleep. But when we go 
to the theater we help kill the villain and embrace the heroine: 
we sigh, we groan, we clench our fists. 

Do you know which stocking you put on first this morning 
or which trousers’ leg you filled first? Do you recall how you 
felt the first time you ever wore a dress suit, or how long it 
took you to put it on, or to learn to tie a bowknot? Can you 
bathe, shave, and dress in six minutes? I can do it in less 
than five. 

A skilled performer at the piano or typewriter or on the 
tennis court acts like an automaton. But no mere automaton 
—human or otherwise—ever makes a great performer. 

356 


ee 


ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


For this reason: heightened sensitivity of the central 
nervous system increases the response of the reflex arcs. A 
tap on flexed patellar tendon elicits no kick when one is 
asleep. Sleep means that central has hung up. But try out 
the knee-kick with your teeth clenched or your fist tightly 
doubled up: more kick. Get real mad: more kick. A lad 
of sixteen is given a little instrument squeezed in the hand to 
measure muscle strength. He squeezes: so many pounds. 
“Best you can do?” “The best.” His best girl enters the 
room. He now beats his record by several pounds. Central 
nervous system more active; everything more active, except 
viscera. | 

A good habit is a well learned habit put to useful purpose. 

The competent driver guides his car as a clever boy his 
bicycle: the right muscles work to the right amounts at the 
proper time and in proper order. A car or a curve or a hole 
or a honk ahead is stimulus enough for eye or ear; the ad- 
justment is made as though it were a reflex, as easy as pie. 
It is an acquired reflex. Paths have been worn for such 
highly complex responses as driving an auto, an airplane, a 
tennis ball, a pair of chopsticks, knife and fork. 

All our habits act by force of habit because these paths are 
worn. We awake in the morning and “before we know it” 
we are at the breakfast table, or possibly “come to” only 
when some headline in the paper catches our eye—perhaps 
already half through our breakfast. And yet, before we 
“came to,” we went through a thousand acts: dressing, shav- 
ing, etc., etc., some of them really complex performances 
requiring delicate adjustments. And the whole bag of tricks 
performed as a result of a single stimulus: a bell, a call, a 
ray of sunlight, gastric tetanus, what not. After that one 
stimulus one act followed another: as Paine’s “Fall of Pom- 
peii’”’ followed from one match. 

Yet there were a thousand responses available for that 
breakfast stimulus. The stimulus was not necessarily fol- 
lowed by a yawn, a stretch, push covers down, one leg out, 

351 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


other leg out, slippers, etc., etc., etc.—one conditioned reflex 
touching off another. But that chain of reactions had been 
performed so many times that the paths connecting up these 
countless reflexes had been worn; all the other possible paths 
of response offered more resistance because they had not been 
worn by constant action. 

A habit, then, is an act so often repeated that it runs itself: 
it does not need our conscious attention; we can give our 
attention to something else. 

The dropped colt picks itself up and walks off: walking 
reflex paths all ready for use; he does not have to learn a 
thing about walking. Think of the ways a child can learn to 
walk, and with only half as many legs as a colt! But whether 
the child learns to walk goosestep, Spanish, or in Chinese size- 
minus-four, depends on incidence of parents and accident 
of locality—for each insists that its own style is right. Nearly 
all our early steps are conditioned into habits backed up by: 
Walk like Iwalk or PIL... ” 

The average mortal has only one habit. The one stimulus 
which rouses him from sleep carries him through the day 
and back to bed and to sleep. All days look alike to him. 
Saturday night is also conditioned into the chain: no fresh 
stimulus needed for the bath! His body’s clock is likewise 
set for Sunday. That day, too, goes by according to schedule, 
and when done is itself the stimulus to resume a new week. 
One habit after another, like a chain, functioning as one. 
Works like a clock wound up for life. Makes a perfect 
clerk, “hand,” or maid. 

This one-habit mode of existence is fine; it gives the brain 
a complete rest. The possessor need never have a thought! 
He is a skilled performer, but never great, on piccolo, at 
athe, behind counter, or on a stool. He does not even make 
a good soldier. There must be visceral dynamics—generally 
called “guts’”—behind a bayonet charge; and high-strung 
central—called ‘“‘brains”—1in control for a sharpshooter. 

302 


ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


The difference between action in an automatic machine and in 
a human genius is brains. 


5 


I smile when you tickle me; I cannot help it, it is a reflex. 
If you smile back, I will learn to smile when you smile. The 
drive in life is hunger. The action in life is to secure food 
and mates to satisfy hunger. Play is preliminary action— 
trying out, testing the capacity of range of action. It differs 
from the reactions of adult life in that it lacks the consum- 
mation response or adjustment. The action has no ulterior 
motive. 

Play is not an instinct; nor is it unique in human beings or 
identical in the human race. It is a form of acquired be- 
havior. The games I play as child or adult will be con- 
ditioned by my bents and especially by social environment. 
What is played, who plays it, how it is played, all depend on 
learned habits of individual response and can only be inter- 
preted in terms of situation, stimulus, and response. 

The stimulus back of play—whether of puppies, children, 
or adults—is a motor mechanism which was built for action, 
glows with action, and in childhood grows best by action. 

Weeding the garden or picking potato bugs is action. But 
there are drawbacks. Repetition—same stimulus, same re- 
sponse; and no end in sight—there seem to be so many weeds, 
so many bugs; if they are to be cleared out, the pace must be 
kept up. That means that the impulse to respond to other 
stimuli that may rise and do keep rising up to beckon the 
child aside must be repressed. 

Play is generally actions of several kinds at the same time. 
Even in a game of marbles a half-dozen different activities 
may function together. The difference between marbles and 
professional baseball is chiefly years: the men have their 
game better organized; are better players because more 
habituated to it; and stick closer to their game. But some- 

303 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


times their game becomes lost in a fight with words, catcalls, 
and pop bottles. 

Margie making mud pies and mother making apple pies 
further illustrate the difference between play of children and 
of adults and between play and work. Mother’s work ends 
when the pie leaves the oven. Margie may grow stale over 
her pie before she has made one, or she may go right on 
making pies until she uses up all the mud. Her impulse is for 
action rather than for consummation. She will stop when the 
impulse for mud-pie action is replaced by another with more 
pull. Such as: “Let’s play dolls,” or, “Dinner is ready.” 

Impulse to action; gratification of that impulse; hang the 
consequences: of such is the play of children, the daydreams 
and castles-in-Spain of adults. 

It is of little consequence to Margie if her pie is dough or 
too big or too little for her pie pan. And of less consequence 
to Johnny when as Heap Big Injun he “scalps” Margie with a 
celluloid paper cutter. And if Margie plays the game she 
will pretend to be scalped, catch her “blood” in her apron, 
and fall down “dead.” 

What man tied to his job all day does not yearn now and 
then to be a Dick Deadeye, a Jesse James, or a Captain Kidd! 
Boys can be. They rob, they hold up trains, they capture 
ships, they bury and dig up chests of gold. We come from a 
long line of freebooters. There is nothing in our inheritance 
which savors of factory, treadmill, or office stool. We must 
acquire these priceless habits, and often at the loss of our 
entire original inheritance, which included freedom to fight 
or run, and everlastingly to fool around. 

The sheer joy of being alive, the supreme joy of action in 
the child! Watch a four-year-old work off his surplus steam. 
Not only is every muscle of his body in action, but his face 
and his speech box are at work. It is as though his entire 
being were so sensitive to excitation that the slightest wind 
that blows excites him to new effort. 

Why not? He has only just discovered the most wonderful, 

304 


3 x» Sea _ 
ty Se re 


ER a 


ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


the most excitable, the most insatiable mechanism in the 
world: a growing human being, himself! That mechanism 
discovered, the boy or girl now sets out to discover the world, 
and does easier than later in life. Life’s innate curiosity has 
not yet been crushed; nor has imagination, the capacity to 
make believe, yet been killed by the “realities” that grown- 
ups cling to like shipwrecked mariners to a rotting spar in 
midocean. 

Spontaneous. As all life is, outside hoopskirts and boiled 
shirts. Impulsive. Where does the impulse come from? 
Where does every living impulse come from—without or 
within? Both. Living beings are expressions of the relation- 
ship between conditions that invite life and beings that re- 
spond to these conditions. And back of the gratification of 
food and mate hunger and the decision to fight or flee is 
knowledge, information, trying things out. Testing oneself, 
learning one’s own capacity. , 

Play is the beginnings of knowledge. Banging the rattle 
on the crib or getting a toe in one’s mouth is an early lesson 
in wisdom. 

Which means that there is no sharp line between playing 
Jesse James and being Jesse James. But the child who stops 
with a stick for a gun will bring down no bigger game in 
later years than he can kill with a daydream. ‘Those of us 
who live only in hopes build only castles in our own air. 

The practical application is this: two boys will pick more 
than twice as many potato bugs as one and pick them faster if 
a definite goal is set—a quart, or a quarter. Still better re- 
sults can be had by setting a phonograph near by with a good 
rhythmic swing to it—say, the “Sambre et Meuse” or the 
“Washington Post March.” Life hates monotony, but loves 
rhythm; in heartbeat, in intestinal contraction, in canoeing, 
in poetry, in music. | 

But do not expect the child to be like you through mere 
imitation. The child will smile when smiled at, laugh when 
others laugh, yell when others yell, look at what others are 

399 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


looking at, listen when others listen, run with or after or from 
others, and duck when others duck. One sheep over the fence, 
all over. Not a sound at night: one dog barks; in five minutes 
fifty dogs are yelping. We also applaud, hiss, whistle, yawn, 
light up, with the crowd. Stimulus and response. Your 
lighting up is stimulus for the same reaction on my part. 

There is also a more direct conditioned stimulus. I cut 
my finger: it bleeds, it hurts; I wince. You cut your finger: 
I see blood, I wince. Watch the crowd at a prize-fight. They 
duck, they dodge, they “Ouch!” They are only less affected 
by the blows than the receivers, or only less jubilant than 
the man who delivered them. There is much human nature 
on exhibition at the prize ring and swimming hole. 


6 


Without habits we are in a bad way, as poorly equipped 
for life as though we had surrendered to habits—then we are 
in a bad way. The clock striking twelve may be adequate 
stimulus for me to remove my clothes. If I cannot control 
that stimulus, the authorities will: the clock strikes that hour 
twice a day. 

This is an extreme case, but it will serve. The clock strikes 
twelve: bedtime. But noon is not midnight. The mere strike 
of twelve is not an adequate stimulus. My bodily mechanism 
is not in the habit of running down at the noon hour. 

If noon is my hour for food, the stroke of twelve sets off 
a different mechanism. If my noon behavior is routine and 
well learned, habit will carry me through. I close my book, 
adjust my desk, reach for my hat and coat, etc., etc. By 
one o’clock I am back at my desk. Habit carried me through 
the hour. My conscious activity was planning a vacation. 

During that lunch hour I performed hundreds of individual 
acts, one after another, in regular order; constituting a fairly | 
distinct routine or habit cf behavior. Although my mind was 
busy with fishing tackle, canoes, and such things, J did not 

396 


ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


have to look out for lamp-posts, breaks in the pavement, or 
step-downs at the curb. I had learned to thread crowded 
streets, remove my hat on entering a restaurant, eat with a 
knife, pay the meal check, etc. All habitual performances: 
learned responses, acquired reflexes, habits. Otherwise, the 
one hour allotted for my meal would not have sufficed. One 
unlearned in city streets might spend a half-hour crossing 
Times Square; if unaccustomed to a menu, muchtime in de- 
ciding what to order. 

We begin with no acquired habits; we begin at once to 
acquire them; with these, to acquire others. But when we 
get to be mere bundles of habits, when we know, when our 
mind is made up, when nothing can move us, we are through; 
we have used up all the blank pages we inherited on which to 
write our life. 

People do get that way. They lose capacity for new expe- 
rience, ability to form new habits, plasticity for new modes 
of response to change. “Life is not what it used to be.” In 
reality, they cannot respond to change. The cab-driver who 
cannot learn to drive a car is out of luck. Whole groups 
find themselves in midair because they cannot change their 
habits fast enough to keep pace with change. Their emotional 
reaction is wasted, misspent energy. They do not thereby 
change conditions, nor are they themselves thereby adapted. 

The champion golfer is not thinking about his stroke: he 
knows his golf: it is a habit. He is thinking about the Cup, 
or his Girl. If he had to think out each stroke, he could not 
even qualify. Ask him to describe any one particular shot 
after the game: he probably will not even be able to recall it. 


“A centipede was happy ’til 
One day a toad in fun 
Said, ‘Pray, which leg moves which?’ 
This raised her doubts to such a pitch 
She fell exhausted in the ditch, 
Not knowing how to run.” 


357 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


Habit formation—golf, tennis, pitching hay, eating 
spaghetti, chewing tobacco, going to church—is at bottom like 
any other form of learning. Learning to play the piano or 
checkers, to read Greek or talk Choctaw, to solve puzzles or 
problems in higher mathematics, involves no new principles 
not used in learning to walk or in forming the habit of rush- 
ing to the window every time the fire engine snorts by. 

Most men shave themselves, but go to the barber shop for 
a hair-cut. It was not always thus, nor is it thus in all lands. 
Custom. Custom also is habit. Our repertoire of habits is 
conditioned by the company we keep. It is not immoral to 
eat with a knife, or a vice to drink tea from a saucer; but 
men are socially executed for less. 

Take shaving. I move from Fiji to Main Street with a 
normal face of hair. Decide to shave in sheer self-defense. 
Do not like the idea—emotionally wrought up. Two things 
follow: I am not likely to forget that shave; if I am not too 
excited I will be able to give it the best I have. Law number 
one of learning: emotional reinforcement; the reflex arcs are 
keyed up for new experience. I may so dislike the idea of 
shaving that my emotion takes a real fighting mood; the re- 
flex arcs are keyed up io resist. 

Not having the shaving habit or habituated to razor-sharp- 
ness, I cut myself. More emotion. Never will forget that 
shave. Nor am I likely to forget the move which resulted in 
acut. Second law: attention or vividness. Learning to shave 
is learning to confine the razor edge to the surface of the 
face. Old school of hard knocks. If the cut were serious, 
my learning to shave might end with the first lesson. Many 
boys stop with one lesson on a pipe. 

Cut not serious. And it is finally all off. Shave again next 
day. Much easier this time. Suppose I had waited a month: 
less easy; too much time to forget what I had learned well 
enough to remember a short time. Memory of first shave 
and memory of movements made are different processes: 

308 


ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


different reflex arcs involved. Third law: recency. No one 
learns to play the fiddle with one lesson a week. 

The fourth law follows—keep it up: repetition. Practice 
makes perfect, wears paths through the nervous system. 

I may begin this first shave at the age of forty. I have had 
no opportunity in life to form habits of action on a reflected 
image, nor have I formed habits of using hands for more 
delicate operations than digging yams. I try a half-dozen 
times. My face is a sight! I give it up—as many men do; 
it is hard to teach an old dog tricks. That is why the boy beats 
his father at golf. -Law five: every man has his limit. But 
with enough stimulus the limit can be extended. If the father 
had to beat his son or have his allowance cut off, he would 
be more likely to succeed. 


7 


Every living being has an inborn emergency equipment. 
For countless beings the equipment is inadequate; they go 
_ down like flies before new foes, new diseases, new situations. 
A large percentage of all the human beings ever born died 
before maturity; the emergency may have been a rusty nail, 
a venturesome spirit, a backward disposition. Anything 
which threatens life or disturbs its peace of mind or upsets the 
system is an emergency. 

Emergencies cannot be listed; they are too numerous. Nor 
can they be described in general terms; they are individually 
discrete. Half a loaf is always better than no bread, but 
there are times when a half-loaf is the dynamic equivalent of 
a human life, when half a minute spells victory or defeat, or 
life or death. There are few of us whose life at one time or 
another has not hung by a thread. 

What do we do, what is our response to crisis? Fight or 
flee? It depends. The cry of “Women first!’ on the Titanic 
was enough to keep the men from fighting for the boats: life 
was not worth fighting for when the loser was a woman. Nor 

359 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


worth saving when a spar would only support one: a man let 
zo of a spar that a woman might live! This is human be- 
havior at its highest. Possible because our inborn emergency 
equipment can be trained, conditioned, educated, made to 
obey the orders of our head. But it is so well organized and 
so powerful that few can turn its command over to the cortex, 
fewer still who can conquer it. Greater is he who conquereth 
self than he who taketh seven cities! 

Greater, because self-preservation is the first law of nature; 
and the higher we climb in nature’s scale, the better organized 
life becomes for self-preservation. Man has more means at 
his command for self-preservation than any other animal, 
largely because he has more ways of destroying his enemies. 
Cities and the “taking of cities’ arose in response to man’s 
desire to anticipate emergencies. 

The difference between self-preservation and self-control 
is the difference between all gorillas and some men. If man 
used only his inborn emergency equipment in a fight with a 
gorilla, he would lose—or die of fright before the gorilla 
could lay hands on him. Fighting instinct, yes; and fleeing 
instinct also. But a worm will turn. A rat will run for its 
life; cornered or caught by a leg in a trap, it will fight for 
its life. | 

There is another kind of response, the kind we keep on 
making during our unconquered-self lives. We are dress- 
ing, already late for dinner. We break a shoestring; we can- 
not find a certain shirt stud; and then that crowning insult, we 
drop the collar button and it rolls under the bureau. Now 
we are mad. We roar like a caged lion; we say words, stamp 
the floor, kick a chair, yank out the bureau. Battles have 
been lost on account of such trifles. 

What happened? Almost everything. Upset—literally. 
Lost his head: that is true also. Also lost his appetite. The 
wife is so disgusted she loses her temper—and calls him 
“brute.” 

It is a brute reaction. It is a biologic reaction: it requires 

360 


ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


neither learning nor headpiece. Out of our inborn emer- 
gency equipment we build up our attitudes, fight windmills 
and straw men, and rip and roar up and down the world, or 
tremble like a leaf at every breath. 

I saw the commander of a United States warship run like 
mad four blocks to prevent a black cat crossing his path. 
That, to him, meant certain death. Such fears are norms of 
behavior; they furnish countless impulses for action. An- 
other commander might also have been moved by the fear of 
black-cat-calamity, but more moved by his uniform to die in 
his tracks rather than run four blocks to head off death. 

To be moved though we move not, is no mere figure of 
speech. Some movements we can control, if we have learned 
control; but not the visceral mechanism which tells motor 
mechanism to move, nor adrenin which prepares the whole 
body for action. 

Even a cat prepares for action. It assumes a fighting pos- 
ture, lashes its tail, and spits. Man has no tail to lash and 
when he is mad or scared cannot spit because his salivary 
glands are out of action; but his internal responses to emotion 
are as real as the cat’s; the visceral organization retires in 
order that the motor mechanism can have all of the body’s 
energy available. When we are so mad we cannot eat, the 
viscera say: “All right, we are not asking you to eat; kill 
somebody, or move.” 

“Every little movement has a meaning of its own,” as the 
old song declared; it is also true that every movement moves 
something. We are never more physiologically correct than 
when we say, “That moves me.” Between birth and death 
many are “moved” enough to dig a Panama Canal, yet they 
never move themselves up out of the cellar of life. 

The difference between being moved to disgust at the sight 
of a dead cat and moving to remove the cat is one of life’s 
little jokes that make human life so interesting. 

We are moved with unstriped or visceral muscle. We move 
with striped or skeletal muscles. To make a gesture is to 

361 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS | 


make an excuse for moving. We are moved with less effort 
than we move: our unstriped muscles function without the 
cortex. They run themselves, and if we are not in charge they 
run us. In mobs and panics they run riot. Every emotion— 
anger, love, merriment, jealousy, grief, fear, remorse—is an 
implicit bodily movement. 

Emotions vary, in individuals, communities, nations, races; 
are under different degrees of control; are aroused by vary- 
ing situations. Emotions are older than the human race; but 
outside the human race are put to no such sublime or ridicu- 
lous ends. We do not begin life with specific loves, hates, 
and fears. Some can go through life without set hates and 
loves. They can look people and things over and decide 
whether they are worth loving or hating, and if they are, 
possess them or do their best to clear the earth of them. But 
as we are, not one in ten can love a Hindu or a Jap or the 
other political party. And much of thinking and talking is 
in terms of hates and fears and loves. We murder at least 
something, if not somebody, every day. And love—there are 
quite as many things to be loved as people. In fact, there 
is nothing, it seems, that cannot come within range of our 
love, except our enemies. Yet there are those who “hate the 
whole . . . sex’; that means half the human race. 

Is it in our very nature to hate our enemies, impossible to 
love them? Why is the very cornerstone of Christ’s teachings 
so rarely taken literally? James thinks those “swayed by it 
might well seem superhuman beings. Their life would be 
morally discrete from the lives of other men, and there is no 
saying whatthe effects might be: they might conceivably trans- 
form the world.” 

They might indeed. 

As the world is, hate is given freer rein. Recently it 
reigned; and each half of the world besought the same God 
to help it kill the other half. We can hate enough to kill, but 
killing no longer solves problems, nor hating an enemy con- 
vert one. | 

362 


ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


Fear is old stuff, out of date. It should be thrown off with 
our swaddling clothes. And yet it probably plays a greater 
part than hope in the daily lives of most men and women. 
Fears are played upon by all sorts of propagandists for politi- 
cal, social, and religious purposes. Fear of hell-fire is sup- 
posed to lead to love of heaven; fear of “‘ign’runt foreigners”’ 
to hatred of aliens and so to the closing of the doors. And 
the only reason this nation could not be led to hate Germany 
as France did was because we could not be made to feel the 
fear of Germany as France did. 

But for most of us life is only meat and the body raiment. 
Same reaction system, same environment: stereotyped be- 
havior because our world stands still. And an enormously 
valuable emotional reservoir of energy, capable of moving 
mountains and giving all life a joy-ride, is expended in hating 
those we envy and kicking against the pricks or in fleeing in 
terror from our shadows because we cannot shake them off. 

And so it is that an instinctive emotional endowment rooted 
deep in the body of life and inherent in man and mammals 
and all living beings that meet dangerous situations with com- 
plex mechanisms which must function as a unit and without 
warning, becomes personal and individual. The organiza- 
tion of that endowment into specific fears and hates and gen- 
eral attitudes favoring negative and positive responses begins 
the day we are born. 


8 


“When I was a child, | spake as a child. I understood as 
a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put 
away childish things.’’ Some childish things we do put away, 
and we do forget most of the rag dolls, tin soldiers, and mud 
pies; but we get our start in childhood for much of our bent 
and most of our set. We do not put away our nature. Paul 
was an exception. 

We are afraid of the dark, of little green worms, of hun- 

363 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


dreds of things. And get emotionally excited about them. 
Some react to a cabbage worm as they would to a wild ele- 
phant or to a mouse; and are as nearly scared to death as 
life lets them. It is no merit of their own that they have not 
died of fright a thousand times. 

We are not born that way. The newborn sets up a fear 
reaction only to fearful stimuli: the bang of a door, being 
dropped, a sudden push or pull at its blanket; especially by 
removing its support. It catches its breath, clutches at any- 
thing within reach, closes its eyes, cries, voids waste. Memo- 
ries of life in the trees? Why not: sudden noises and move- 
ments and withdrawal of support were real dangers then. 
The infant could not flee, but it could be scared; later it runs 
and hides when it is afraid. 

A rat learns to thread a maze for food: it must pass a 
trap which always terrifies it. Remove the trap: it jumps 
as though the trap were present. A dog chases a cat up a tree 
four times a day. Every time the dog appears I appear. By 
and by the cat takes to the tree without the dog—my face is 
enough to make it climb a tree. 

A small dog was tossed into the carriage of a 180-days-old 
child. The sudden and unexpected move terrified it. A year 
later it showed the same kind of terror at tame white mice. 
A door was slammed and at the same time a cat was shown to 
a child; thereafter it was afraid of the cat. 

The child is afraid of a sudden and loud noise. It hears 
the thunder, sees the lightning; it learns to be afraid of the 
lightning. If the flash is blinding, it is afraid of the room. 
If there is some particular person in the room every time the 
lightning flashes, the child learns to be afraid of that person, 
lightning or no lightning. 3 

With a what-not loaded with what not in the parlor and a 
dresser covered with hand-painted junk in the spare bedroom, 
and both parlor and bedroom in perpetual gloom, means must 
be found to keep little Willie out. A short-cut is found in 
the fact that Willie can be scared. And Willie is scared. By 

364 


ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


the time he is three, or sooner, he is as big a coward as his 
mother was when she was three. He is afraid of the dark; 
jumps every time a door is slammed; squeals at the sight of 
a mouse; and if a bat flies into the room, the whole house- 
hold is in a panic. And everybody has bad dreams. And 
little Willie comes out of his nightmare in a cold sweat with 
a scream: some ghost story has done its work. 

We move about in a lighted room with the aid of our eyes. 
In a dark room we are not distracted by what we see and con- 
sequently are more alert to what we feel and hear. We keep 
meeting with the unexpected, sometimes the sudden—crash of 
a falling chair, bark of a dog, bump on the forehead. And 
by the time our fear of the dark has become further condi- 
tioned by ghosts and hobgoblins, we are more than afraid of 
a dark graveyard. And if mother is afraid of strangers and 
shows it, we are afraid also, because our habit of expectancy 
of her behavior is dislocated. | 

So with rage. The baby cannot fight, but by cries, slash- 
ings with arms and legs, stiffening of body, flushed face, 
clenched fists, and held breath, it shows its rage when its 
nose is pinched, head held, or its body hampered. And it 
soon acquires the ability to kick and slash and scream. I 
have seen a boy of two beat his head on the floor in a rage at 
being denied something. Such early outbursts are signs of 
the coward and the murderer that are in us. The way these 
potentialities are trained is the key to character and the clue 
to most of our attitudes. 

A nurse bathes a child each day, first tickling its feet or 
pinching its nose. A habit grows up, functioning like an in. 
stinct on reflex arcs. The mere sight of the nurse calls out 
a gurgle ora rage. If the nurse wears a blue dress habitually, 
the blue dress is enough. If the baby knows only one blue 
dress and that blue dress always means tickle or pinch, any 
blue dress becomes enough for gurgle or a fit. 

We come to hate everything associated with our early hates; 
afraid of everything associated with early fears. The ran: 

365 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


dom fears and rages come to be attached to new objects not 
contemplated in the original scheme of kill-or-cure emotional 
reinforcement. They become specific. The baby is not 
naturally afraid of lightning; it is afraid of a sudden crash. 
Nor is it naturally afraid of darkness, snakes, strangers, 
graveyards, or black cats. 

Our emotions are conditioned in the same nursery in which 
our growing body learns its first steps. As the movements of 
motor mechanism become habits and so function on smooth- 
running reflex arcs, the emotions themselves become organ- 
ized: the live-or-die glands and the autonomic nerves learn 
special modes of behavior. They take on habits, learn new 
responses, acquire new friends, new foes, new fears. The 
mouth waters under certain conditions. Fear is called out 
under certain conditions. Certain persons, things, situa- 
tions, call out tantrums, cries, rages; others are sources of 
attachment, loves. 

Practice makes perfect—hates and fears as well as tennis- 
players and card sharps. One does not naturally love a cat 
or hate a nurse or fear a mouse. But with practice the thresh- 
old is lowered, the message gets a quicker response. Only 
intense stimuli at first called out these emotional responses. 
But a youngster “nearly scared to death” is already on the 
way to be a coward. The child “nearly tormented to death” 
has laid the foundation for a vicious temper. 

It is like a cork. First time out requires effort.. There- 
after, any old corkscrew will suffice. By and by, a thumb- 
nail. 

The function of emotion is quick action and a long memory. 
if I am the victim of a $100 counterfeit bill to oblige a 
stranger who needs change, I am not likely to oblige the 
next stranger requiring change. I might even “take it out 
on him.” We do such things. The horse-buyer knows that 
a horse which has had the mange does not forget it: it is tied 
in. He strokes the flank of a prospective purchase. Lip 
quivers: that horse had the mange. 

366 


ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


Love, fear, and hate start out together; they grow up to- 
gether. Meanwhile, the reflex which enables the newborn to 
support its body by its hands soon disappears; the human 
mother does not hang her baby on a limb to dry, nor does the 
infant have to cling to her while she climbs down a tree. It 
disappears from lack of use. The primitive hate and fear 
types of behavior would also disappear if they were not at 
once set to work. 

The adjusting mechanism learns—only too blindly. Until 
we ourselves are blind. Having eyes, we see not what there 
is but what we think we see. We see with a body that by 
nature has a huge capacity to hate that which threatens us, 
to fear that which endangers us, to love that which protects 
and feeds and tickles us. Our ancestors had to have a fear- 
response to the new, the unexpected, the sudden, and the 
strange. ‘That is no reason why we should jump, turn pale, 
sweat, gasp for breath, close our eyes and open our mouths, 
and feel creepy every time we hear thunder or backfire, or 
are left alone in the dark, or confront a novel and strange 
idea. Nor should the same emotion that makes us fear the 
novel and the strange impel us to hate reason—even though 
reason interfere with our routine behavior, including aitti- 
tudes, desires, ideals, ambitions, and loves. We do not get 
jealous of reason or want to fight it; but we do get so enraged 
at a book that we throw it in the fire, so mad at an opinion that 
we would like to crucify the man who expresses it. 

The haunting fear in Dickens’s day seems to have been 
poverty; the supreme dread, the almshouse. What is our 
haunting fear, our supreme dread? Have we progressed 
very far? 

With “pep” we can make decisions, use our heads; but 
when the visceral nerves take charge, decisions are made for 
us—we are as human as iron filings around a magnet or 
famished hogs around a swill barrel. A man in a “towering 
rage” is more physically fit for murder than one in cold 
blood—that is what a towering rage is for, prepare the body 

367 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


for action with adrenin. Hate is biologically useful. Do 
we save it up for the hateful occasions and get the work out 
of it it can do, or squander it right and left? 

Fear and rage are twins: born of the same necessity. But 
we are born of human parents in a state of civilization. Civi- 
lization clings to savagery and brutality because fundamental 
emotional states are retained as weapons in the endless battles 
of religion, society, and nationality. Biologic fears, hates, 
and loves are put to a thousand uses that could never have 
been contemplated in the original scheme of evolution. That 
scheme says: if your neighbor’s eye offend you, pluck it out; 
but that scheme made no provision for theft, swindling, ly- 
ing, blackmail, slavery, war. Our scheme does. 

Our bottled emotions find curious outlets: giggles, tears, 
laughter, shame, remorse, rage, grief, love, fear, as the case 
may be; and take us to fights, dances, games, theater, specula- 
tion, futile argument, Monte Carlo, or the Count of Monte 
Cristo; or they may end in hysteria, phobias, manias. 

The big question for each one of us individually is whether 
our acquired repertoire of specific loves, fears, and hates will 
suffice to keep us on good terms with ourselves and at peace 
with the world. Many a man loses his job because his viscera 
have never been educated nor his emotions trained. Note too 
that under stress of strong rage or fear activity in the digestive 
system closes down, predisposing to intestinal disorders in- 
cluding bacterial toxins and consequently to other far-reach- 
ing organic changes. Love on the contrary hastens food 
digestion and heightens metabolism. Love is a better tonic 
than rage or fear. 


9 


Look at a thirty-months-old boy; better yet, mind him for a 
few days! You are looking at Freud’s Unconscious Mind, 
Watson’s Unverbalized Behavior. 

Why can we recall nothing of those first thirty months, 

368 


ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


most of us nothing of the first forty months? Enough hap- 
pened. If all our bumps, knocks, cuffs, and “‘repressions” 
are locked up in the Unconscious, it is a spacious place. 

What became of all the food our blood absorbed during 
those months? Some was built into our bodies, some was 
used as energy, and what was left over was stored as fat. 
What happened to the Don’ts, Naughty-naughtys, and Shame- 
on-you’s? Some got built in as parts of habits of response. 
We learned to love our mother, nurse, anybody or anything 
that got conditioned into our response mechanism for loving. 
We learned likewise to hate the butcher boy who pulled our 
ear or pinched us every chance he got; and forever after 
disliked everybody who suggested butcher boy. Butcher boys 
should be more careful. 

Horses also. 

A young man is upset by the sight of a horse and will cross 
the street to get away from one. This is “strange,” we say. It 
is a “psychosis,” says Freud; and by analysis of the Uncon- 
scious can be cured. It is next to nothing, says the psycholo- 
gist; all of us have our little peculiarities: some of us are 
delighted at the sight of a horse and will cross the street to 
pat it or kiss it on the nose. Further, says the psychologist, 
I know when I am conscious and that “consciousness” is 
simply being conscious; and that I know nothing that I cannot 
name or describe. Abnormal behavior toward a horse or 
anything else seems mysterious only because we are not in 
possession of all the facts or even principal factors back of 
the behavior of the individual. 

The horse that bit the child made him dislike all horses. 
He cannot now recall the bite; his reaction-system can and 
does. In one lesson he learned to mistrust a horse. Many 
big things are learned early in life with one lesson. Few 
pick up a red-hot poker or stick their tongues to an ice-cold bit 
of iron twice. One lesson was enough: it took the skin off. 

I have no memory of my red-hot-poker lesson, but I have a 
scar on my hand; I can recall to memory the skin of my 

369 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


tongue I left on the ice-cold iron I was invited to “taste,” 
although it left no scar on my tongue. One incident happened 
when I was two; the other, when I was six. We have no 
memory for our early kinesthetic and emotional organization 
—the Freudian Unconscious. 

The story of an elephant balking at a bridge where he had 
had a mishap seventeen years earlier, although the bridge was 
now concrete, may or may not be true. The point is that if 
I have an unconscious mind, the elephant has. Also dogs, 
goldfish and oysters. Every animal has a dynamic mechanism 
that can be shocked at one shock and profit by experience. 

Which means: we can all learn and what we learn makes 
us what we are—and determines whether we want more of 
it or not. Our bodies learn thousands of things we cannot 
describe or name. We have a thousand likes and dislikes | 
for which we can give no explanation beyond: “I just like it,” 
or, “I simply can’t bear it!” 

We remember back to a certain fairly definite period of 
our lives; beyond that our conscious memory is a solid blank, 
yet our body acts as though it remembered. It does, but that 
is not memory; not by such remembering are we conscious. 
If so, there would be no excuse to postulate Unconscious. 

It is behavior—no doubt about that. Call it unverbalized. 
The unverbalized in us is all that the body learned before 
our babblings were organized into speech: modes of response 
learned without words. We cannot think about it because 
thinking is talking without perceptible movement in speech 
mechanism. We cannot be conscious of it—as conscious 
is used in psychology, the “fact of naming our universe of 
objects both inside and out”—because we cannot connect it 
up with the mechanism by which we name our universe of 
objects. For the same reason, we cannot remember it. Nor 
will any amount of psycho-analysis bring it into memory. 
Often it can be brought to light with outside help—mothers, 
nurses, etc. 

Before we take on habits of speech we take on a huge 

370 


ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


amount of habits of mind: kinesthetic and emotional organi- 
zation. Innumerable actions are performed with the skeleta] 
muscles so often that they function like inherent reflexes. 
So also innumerable mental attitudes—prejudices for and 
against all manner of people and objects—are called out so 
often that the body-mind instinctively reacts. The visceral 
muscles and the entire autonomic system “work like a charm.” 
These early conditioned habits have enormous influence on the 
future of the individual. 

Watson contrasts the child of four just home from the 
movies, who talks you deaf, dumb, and blind, with a child of 
twenty-seven months who is a skillful performer on a large 
kiddy-car. He could guide it, coast downhill, and make all 
the adjustments. His kinesthetic organization was complete 
master of the car. But “Billy ride kiddy-car’” was his only 
parallel word organization. Which means that Billy has no 
memory organization of these bodily processes except when 
he is so placed that he can exhibit the bodily organization. 

Billy had been a bottle baby. At the age of twenty-seven 
months he was tested as to his memory for a bottle. At the 
regular hour he was told, “Dinner ready,” and put in a crib 
and handed a bottle, as was the custom fifteen months before. 
Billy reacted like a tramp who asks for pie and is given an ax 
—he got mad. Dinner? In a crib with a bottle of milk? 
Crib meant nothing to him. He had never learned to be 
afraid of it; he had forgotten it. The crib habit was gone, 
buried beneath other habits. Bottle also. “Dinner” to him 
was meat and vegetables. When the nurse said, “Take your 
milk,” Billy began to chew the nipple— thought it was a new 
kind of meat! And he looked at his mother with disgust for 
cheating him out of his dinner. 

The entire crib-bottle-nipple-sucking-smiling habit was 
gone. Neither objects, faces, nor words used when Billy was 
a bottle baby could now call out any of the old habit re- 
sponses. Adults often choke when they try to suck through a 
straw: it has been so long since they used that inherent habit. 

371 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


Infancy is infancy, the next stage after fetal life. Dur- 
ing infancy we prepare to shift for ourselves. That is the 
biologic significance of infancy. It is no more unnatural or 
unconscious than fetal life. We learn, take on, acquire, 
habits of behavior. 

We may form incestuous attachments: have an Edipus or 
an Electra complex. But such attachments are not talked 
about, because, as Watson says, “society is not organized to 
ban incestuous attachments in the making’’; there were no 
repressions. Habits connected with “the slowing or speeding 
of the sexual organs” have not been verbally organized. Few 
men and fewer women have paralleled their sex organization 
with words. 

Most of our emotional organization, from infancy to old 
age, is never verbalized. There are neither adequate words 
nor social mechanism for word conditioning of the infant. 
Elimination, eructation, releasing gas, masturbation, etc., 
were verbalized only when exhibited in the presence of others. 
In short, nearly all visceral and emotional habits are as a rule 
learned without parallel verbal organization. They make up 
our unverbalized behavior. 


10 


An Egyptian king wanted to learn the original language, 
possibly the speech of the builders of the Tower of Babel be- 
fore their language was confounded. He had some children 
brought up by deaf mutes. The children learned the deaf- 
mute language. There was no more an original language 
than an original bill of fare or an original wardrobe. 

The bullfrog’s spouse call has probably changed little since 
the first frog, impelled by love and with the aid of vocal 
cords, lifted up his voice. If there is an “original” language, 
we shall find its purest form in a frog pond on a summer 
night. In the years of evolution that voice developed in 
various directions and was put to various ends, but wherever 

312 


ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


there is voice there is a sensori-motor mechanism back of it. 
This mechanism reaches great perfection among birds and 
mammals, especially among Primates. 

Can monkeys talk? They do: in articulate speech, by 
grimaces, by signs. They talk all they need to; they under. 
stand one another. To that extent their language is as definite 
as ours. The more one studies the apes, the greater the 
puzzle as to why they do not learn to speak English; we do 
not yet know that they cannot. But it is conceivable that a 
chimpanzee, brought up from birth and conditioned by human 
voices, could learn to distinguish and make response to several 
hundred words. 

Accustomed as we are to regulated flows of conversation, 
monkey and other mammal talk seems largely exclamations: 
cries of rage, fear, pain, courtship, etc. It is emotional 
language. Monkeys especially have a large repertoire of 
finely shaded emotional calls. How many and what the 
shades and tones signify, we do not know. There are individ- 
ual variations; the mother monkey knows when her own 
youngster shrieks for help. 

That is about the extent of our inherent repertoire. We 
can all cry and grunt, and we have our own key and pitch; 
with that our voice training begins. A mother easily dis- 
| tinguishes the cry of her child from among twenty-five babies 
in a nursery. These cries presumably differ with emotional 
states—hunger, pain, rage, fear, etc. 

Within thirty days a normal infant’s voice begins to roam 
around, as its hand and arm do; as though it were trying its 
voice out. It has a vocal mechanism; it exercises it. All 
living mechanisms are excitable, tongue especially. A cur- 
rent of air is always available in breathing; that current 
flows between vocal cords and through a resonator. Lips in 
certain position, tongue in certain position, cords vibrating: 
sounds result. 

It is a long road between early random sounds and the 
first word, as it is between random reachings out and grasp- 

373 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


ing a cup. But a sound is a sound and the ear of the child 
hears the sound. The sound means nothing definite to the 
child’s ear at first. Early sounds are as general and as aim- 
less as random squirmings elsewhere in its body mechanism. 
Some excitatory stimulus—a pin, a tight bandage, oxygen or 
food starvation, thirst, slamming of a door, the glow of a full 
stomach, the comfort of a warm bed—is impulse for action. 
Its range of reactions is limited and as yet unlearned, untu- 
tored by experience. It has not learned definite responses. 
It has not yet learned to walk to the tap and draw a cup of 
water; it has not yet learned that “Dink!” will bring the 
water. 

The baby’s ear hears the sound; it makes it again, as it 
reaches for its toe again once it has discovered how. And 
again. And again. In all living matter nothing functions 
as fast as babies. M,N, NG, H, W, Y, R, OW, O, E, long A, 
short A: all in thirty days. Hearing others produce these 
sounds becomes stimulus for repeating them. Baby is given 
a rattle and says, “Oh.” Mother says, “Oh, baby.” Baby 
bangs the rattle and chatters, “Oh, oh, oh,” like a magpie. 
It has begun to learn English. 

But habits of language begin somewhat later than other 
activities such as are performed with hands, arms, legs. Be- 
fore baby can say “water” or “drink” it has learned appro- 
priate responses to hundreds of objects and many complex 
situations. 

With more vocal building-blocks more sounds are pro- 
duced. There comes a day when baby wants something. It 
jabbers away. And finally says, “Dada.” Great excitement. 
Wants its father! He is produced. It was not father that was 
wanted. Other articles are produced. A rag doll. That is 
what baby wants! “Dada” means rag doll! “Dada” may 
be the baby’s word for rag doli for months. Every baby 
has its own vocabulary. Words become substitutes for bodily 
movements. Language habits replace bodily habits. Before 
the baby can understand the language of its parents, the 

374 





ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


parents understand the baby’s language—and jump accord- 
ingly. For babies, as Watson says, enjoy such tyranny as is 
rarely displayed by the crowned heads of history. 

Endless repetition. Tryings out, tryings on. A slow proc- 
ess. But fast time once a real start is made. “Dog” at 
first means dog, also cat, also bone. The meanings of words 
become restricted; the words themselves, whether spoken or 
heard, more definitely conditioned. “Dada” gives way to 
“doll” and “daddy.” The baby’s vocabulary is replaced by 
parents’ vocabulary. The useless and random sounds and 
words disappear; those which bring results are retained. 

The learning processes involved in conditioning the appe- 
tite, using knife and fork, and taking food, are all the same. 

A girl of twenty-eight months has a vocabulary of 400 
words; a boy of forty-three months, 960 words; a boy of 
fifty-four months, 2,000 words—enough to carry a moron 
through life. The college graduate rarely knows more than 
9,000 words. 

Language is part of human adjustment, learned as other 
actions or habits are learned. Every normal newborn has the 
potential ability to learn to talk English, Kwakiutl, Chinese, 
Zulu—any language. He learns one—English, let us say; 
learns it well. At twenty it will be difficult for him to learn 
French, more difficult to learn Zulu; by the time he is fifty 
it will be very difficult, so difficult that few do it. English 
is of little help in learning Kwakiutl: one goes head first, the 
other goes feet first. 

Each language employs certain phonetics and proceeds 
after its own grammatical form. In learning English, speech 
organs and ears are trained to English phonetics, to the rules 
of English grammar. Over a hundred muscles are involved; 
delicate adjustments of an extraordinary complex mecha- 
nism; to say nothing of the tongue itself. This neuro-muscular 
mechanism learns English: English is its habit. To learn 
English phonetics, other hundreds of possible sounds and 

3795 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


word combinations have been neglected; they can be rescued, 
if at all, with difficulty. 

A pair of chopsticks and knife-fork-spoon are about as 
different-looking objects as one can easily imagine. They 
seem to have nothing in common. So with English and 
Chinese, spoken or written. The two languages do not look 
alike; they sound as unlike as cat and canary talk. With the 
same inherent equipment of muscles and organs the child 
learns to eat with chopsticks and talk Chinese if brought up 
in a Chinese household; or to eat with knife-fork-spoon and 
talk English if brought up where such eating tools are the 
fashion and English is the mother tongue. Children of 
English parents brought up in India or China often learn 
first the manners of eating and the speech of their native 
nurses. A resounding belch after the meal is “good man- 
ners” in certain parts of the world. Manners are habits. 

If the baby hears baby-talk, baby-talk will be its first 
language, its mother tongue. It may never feel so much at 
home in any other language. Even tones are learned. Every 
child can learn to whine or talk through its nose, or to speak 
in coarse. or harsh tones. If such have value in the house- 
hold, the baby will learn to fix their value. A dozen words 
from a two-year-old may “speak volumes” for the house- 
hold. 

In hundreds of languages there is a distinct word meaning 
water; and several ways of pronouncing “water” in English. 
Why so many words for the same thing, so many ways of 
pronouncing the same word? Each language has its own 
short-cuts to verbal activity, its own verbal response to H20. 
You pronounce w-a-t-e-r one way, I pronounce it another: 
we learned it that way. Having learned it that way, we 
react to other pronunciations of “water” as we react to 
other forms of behavior differing from our own. If we wait 
until we are grown, we find it difficult to pronounce “Teau” 
as the Frenchman does—or understand his idea of water. We 
get set in our ways. Our vocal structure gets set in its ways. 

376 





ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


Especially the larynx. Between twelve and fifteen it under- 
goes great structural change. 

Removal of the larynx removes the vocal cords and so 
destroys the capacity to speak aloud. But as long as an air 
passage is open from lungs to pharynx and mouth, whispered 
speech is possible. If the passage is closed so that one must 
breathe through an opening in the trachea below the larynx, 
there can be no whispered speech. Such cases are known: 
they can speak neither in nor above a whisper; yet they learn 
to make all the movements necessary for articulate speech. 

From all of which Watson argues that thinking is action 
in a certain motor mechanism, as winking is action in a cer: 
tain motor mechanism. We think in words; words are lan- 
guage mechanism activity. Hence, thought is language 
mechanism in action. Destruction of enough of that mecha- 
nism to make impossible any of the movements involved in 
speech is to make thought, and probably life, impossible. 

Certain phases of human culture certainly would be impos- 
sible without language. Nor is any culture known without 
its linguistic constituent. As Kroeber says, it is difficult to 
imagine any generalized thinking without words or symbols 
derived from words. Religious beliefs and certain phases of 
social organization such as caste ranking, marriage regula- 
tions, kinship recognition, and law, also seem dependent on 
speech. But it is conceivable that certain inventions might be 
made and the applied arts developed in a fair measure by 
imitation among a speechless people. How and why primi- 
tive man alone of the Primates developed the faculties for 
speech and culture remain a profound puzzle. 


Il 


For over two years the child has been using words, but only 
after two years’ trial and error and constant effort and end- 
less corrections can the child be said to have a well-organized 
verbal behavior. From the age of three and on, word and 

ads 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


kinesthetic organizations are put on simultaneously. By the 
time we are four we have added to our kinesthetic and emo- 
tional organization a third element of behavior: we can talk; 
we can react with words. 

We begin our word organizations early. We learn “‘ball” 
and a ball. We learn what follows when we do not respond to 
“Don’t!” “Blow your nose!” “Stop teasing little sister!” 
“Bad boy!” “Shame on you!” 

Very shortly the infant’s world is largely words—together, 
serving as stimuli to call out reactions. The times without 
end that we react to “Let that alone!”” As a consequence we 
come to answer a vast word-world with words. The word-or- 
ganization dominates. The sensori-motor throat-mechanism 
becomes the controlling segment of the body. The tongue 
becomes gifted! 

We can remember our games of marbles and ball, and the 
birds’ nests we robbed, and the early swims in the creek, and 
the arrowheads we found, and the hundreds of actions per- 
formed after three or four years of age, because we talked 
about them at the time. How well we remember them depends 
on the extent to which our word organization paralleled such 
bodily actions and the amount of emotional reinforcement 
accompanying such actions. 

Thus, word organization that accompanied explicit body 
organization plays two roles in behavior: we can always talk 
about it, memory; we can by words begin, correct, modify, 
or control the total reaction. | 

I can talk about learning to swim; I cannot talk about learn- 
ing to walk. Learning to swim was accompanied by talk—of 
swimming. Learning to walk was accompanied by bumps 
and bruises—often vocalized but not verbalized. In later 
years a bump on the shin or a fall on the ice generally finds 
us speechless but rarely emotionless. 

By the time we reach school we solve problems on paper: 
build houses and bridges, explore the Amazon, cross Asia 
with Marco Polo, conquer Europe with Napoleon, write 

; 378 








ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


books, edit newspapers, make love to Dido. There is no end 
to this verbal organization, no limit to our capacity to make 
verbal response. Only memory sets the limit to the problems 
that can be solved with words. 

But we do not always say the word. The stimulus to call 
a man a cur may be great: we repress it and “get hot under 
the collar’; or to pronounce the name of a loved one: we 
repress it and blush or giggle; or, think it over. 

Every word of the 400 the girl of twenty-eight months 
knows is a conditioned reflex. Her eye sees candy; her 
mouth waters candy; her voice says candy; she says candy 
until she gets it: all learned responses, all habits, all reflexes. 
To say “candy” is an explicit act of behavior; it implies 
stimulus, receptor-conductor-effector. The effector was the 
voice mechanism, the speech organ. Suppose she had not 
said candy but thought candy: would this have been an act 
of behavior? Is thinking candy a reaction? ) 

We talk to ourselves, some incessantly. We call it “‘think- 
ing out loud.” It is: thinking aloud. Many never learn to 
read without moving the lips; closer inspection of their throat 
shows all the muscular movements involved in reading aloud, 
except in the vocal cords. They move their lips because they 
have never completed the transition stage between explicit and 
implicit language habits, between talking and thinking. 

Children talk; and keep on talking. They are responding 
to stimuli. There comes the stimulus: “Keep still or Ill 

. . They keep right on talking—but to themselves. They 
Jearn the new habit of talking without articulating; the vocal 
cords do not participate in the action. By and by they learn 
to drop even overt lip movements. They can think the word 
hunger without overt movement of any of their laryngeal- 
throat-mouth mechanism. The taking on of such habits begins 
early and involves no new or strange process either in learn- 
ing or in the conditioning of reflex arcs. Almost as soon as 
the child can talk it is told not to talk. But the child has 
already learned to make adjustments. with words. By trial} 

379 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


and error it learns to drop its voice, to whisper, and finally 
to dispense with all overt movement. It is now a real thinker. 
A shrewd observer and a good lip-reader can read the thoughts 
of others who have not learned to think except in overt move- 
ment. 

“Now think of something; think hard!” You think of, 
say, beefsteak. To your chagrin and amazement, the clever 
observer says, “You are thinking of beefsteak!” Try it on 
yourself. But there are those whose thoughts cannot be read. 
They can think ‘without overt muscle contraction, so short- 
circuited and abbreviated has become the habit. The ob- 
server’s eye detects no sign of movement, but could we apply 
delicate instruments capable of picking up nerve impulses 
and detecting faint muscle contractions, we should find that 
thinking “‘beefsteak” differs from saying “beefsteak” only in 
degree of action. 

I enter a restaurant with my stomach crying food and 
my mouth watering beefsteak and my throat thinking beef- 
steak. I sit down in a chair. That stimulates the waiter: he 
responds with ice-water, etc. But I want beefsteak. I can 
make that want known by several methods: I can make a 
picture of it; describe it; point to it on the menu or to a plate 
of it on another table; or produce one from my pocket and 
make signs of more. Any one of these methods might stimu- 
late the waiter to action. But he is in the habit of respond- 
ing to word stimuli. I say, “Beefsteak.” That word spoken 
within his hearing brings quick results. And with a beefsteak 
I am adjusted—to food. 


The chief business of thinking, as implicit language proc- 


esses, is for individual adjustment. The supreme value of 
language is as an instrument of adjustment in social organi- 
zation. Because of language the situations which confront 
individual members of society are extraordinarily complex 
and infinitely varied. Most of these situations, or stimuli, are 
word situations; we can adjust with words. Sometimes we 
“Katy did!” “Katy didn’t!”’ the whole night long. 
380 





7 
| 





ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


Of course, we think with our entire body. Our entire bodily 
organization is at work: at times at a high rate, at times 
low; at almost all times one part is more active than another. 
Rarely do we get into action with our bodily organization 
functioning as a unit and to the limit of its capacity. The 
body thinks, now here, now there, and the responses are 
always in keeping with the conditioned reflexes in implicit as 
well as in explicit mechanism. We do not reveal all our 
thoughts, nor always even think them in words to ourselves; 
nor does an ameba or a cat. Our bill of inherited “rights” 
is not less. 


12 


Man is a talking animal and because he can talk has in- 
creased his response mechanism beyond measure. Most of 
our adjustments are with words, and for most of us the 
older we get the more we rely on words. Our verbalized 
organization dominates our life. But our earliest and our 
last responses, and many in between, are speechless, part 
of our unverbalized behavior; we only look the part, by a 
smile or a frown. Response without words is the more ancient 
mode of adjustment. 

Language short-cuts work and play and makes culture pos- 
sible, but because of language we become complexly inte- 
grated. Words become loaded. One word can set more men 
marching to death than any one earthquake ever killed or 
volcano drove from home. “Lend me five dollars” can lead 
to action as overt as a wink or a kick on the shin. If “Lend 
me five dollars’ leads to explanations, the explanation re- 
action is also overt. 

To the thousand petty annoyances, discomforts, and sense- 
less situations of life, few of us have any reaction beyond 
words: “What a nuisance!”’ “Isn’t it a shame!” “That ought 
to be remedied,” “Some day they will do better,” etc., etc. 
We pick our way about through the flotsam and jetsam of 
stupidity and ignorance of yesterdays, without a move to 

381 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


clean up the mess beyond words, words, words. We grow 
indignant and with clenched fists and flushed face exclaim that 
we could show them what we etc., if etc. We have thereby 
fought a righteous battle for the good of the cause. Words, 
words, words. Even the air is full of words these days. 

We bandy words as boxers spar for position. We play our 
-best golf in the club-house; turn the rascals out in hot argu- 
ment in the smoking car; bring peace on earth good-will to 
men. at church; and correct our bad habits and save up money 
in bed. 

If you will listen to me I can prove to you that I am an 
expert golfer and that I am really interested in good govern- 
ment: I can prove it with words. And if you are a good 
fellow you will take me at my word; but if not, you will brag 
about your golf and tell me what you would do if you were 
_ President. 

There are many star performers with their verbal organiza- 
tion who rarely let their bodily motor mechanism get into 
action: he-men who never fought a fight or played a game of 
one-ole-cat, golf, or tennis in their lives; reformers who were 
never in a voting booth. 

Even talking wears some people out. They just think. 
They are content to think themselves good golfers, good citi- 
zens, good Christians. They think beautiful thoughts, poems, 
pictures, music, peace on earth, etc., etc. Even thinking tires 
some people. “In winter I set and think; in summer I just 
set.” 

“Don’t bother father; he’s thinking.” One might suspect 
him of being asleep. What is father thinking with? His 
mind? Is thinking action? If it is, and if he is thinking hard, 
he will be consuming energy. There is no action without 
energy. If father can think without energy consumption, he 
should be removed to a museum where they keep mermaids. 

After an hour “father’’ rises, puts out the light, and goes 
to bed. That may have been his regular hour for bed. Yet 
in that hour he may have done the “biggest day’s work of his 

382 





ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


life.” He may have reached a decision “momentous” in his 
own and his family’s life. Great Scott! his decision might 
iffect the destiny of nations! 

What was the decision? How can I know: he said nothing, 
made no move or sign, no overt explicit act of any kind. For 
all I know he may have decided to sell the car, give up smok- 
ing, change his bootlegger, run for President, or declare war. 

“Well, fellows, what do you think about it?” One nods; 
one shakes his head; one turns his thumbs down; one shrugs 
his shoulders; one winks; one whistles; one clears his throat. 
The last “fellow” rises to emphasize his remarks: “Well, 
fellows, if you ask me what I think, I say: Oh, hell! That’s 
what J think!” 

The “fellows” usually voice what they think. One word 
stimulates another: many cannot stop, once the first word is 
uttered. We fight countless battles with words. With words 
we fly to the moon and build castles-in-Spain. In fact, the 
range of our activities is only limited by our vocabulary. 
That is why we think so much: one word stimulates another; 
we cannot stop. There is no problem we cannot wrestle with 
in thought. Thinking is so easy, Watson calls it laryngeal 
itch. 

When our thinking is in words we are thinking “out loud”’ 
or “to ourselves.” The latter is silent laryngeal itch. The 
stimulus for such thinking or silent verbalization need not 
differ from any other stimulus to which other mechanisms or 
higher or lower centers of the body respond. It is called itch 
because we can make such varied responses to such varied 
stimuli without “turning a hand”; it is so much easier to turn 
it over to the mind. “I will think about it.” 

The stimulus that sets us thinking may come from within: _ 
hunger, sex, etc. More generally from without: anything in 
the environment, from a house falling on us, to, “Come!” 

And so we “think it over” in unvoiced words. If our 
vocabulary is large we can think widely. But the poorest 
of us can in our thoughts take journeys on yachts, endow 

383 | 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


charities, win ball games, paint the house, kill off our ene- 
mies, write novels, compose operas. Our only limit is words. 
As there is a verbal substitute for every object in the world 
the limit of the world we can carry about with us is set by our 
verbal organization. 

Father may have thought out a way to buy a new car, the 
stimulus for such thinking having been any one of the count- 
less stimuli which excite people to think new car. The family 
will ride in the car when father says a word, nods his head, 
or writes a check. It is the thinking that gets into the picture 
that counts. 

The stimulus of an empty stomach serves the newborn for 


its first thought: it says it with certain general bodily move- — 


ments; two years later it says it with a specific mechanism 
which makes a sound like “hungry.” Sixty years later the 
response may be the same, even though no ear can hear 
the word of the man who thinks it. In other words thinking 
may be kinesthetic, verbal, or emotional. If we are hampered 
in our bodily actions we talk; if our verbal thinking is 
blocked emotional thinking dominates us. The final act may 
be an unverbalized “‘judgment”—which need not be a rational 
conclusion but is likely to express our irrational dislikes. 

In silent words we make countless adjustments. To think 
it out is an implicit habit of response. There are also implicit 
hereditary or instinctive responses, as in changes in respira- 
tion, circulation, and the whole system of hormone secretions. 
Explicit habits of response are eating with a knife and fork, 
playing tennis, staying on good terms with one’s own and 
the opposite sex, etc. There are also explicit hereditary or 
instinctive responses, as in grasping, sneezing, etc., and in 
the emotional reactions in rage, fear, and love. If the solu- 
tion of a thought-out problem is not translated into overt 
explicit action, spoken or written, or other explicit bodily 
reaction, there has been no adjustment: the world of environ- 
ment is just what it was. 

Man’s responses are uniquely his own because he has so 

384 








ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


many words to respond with, so many ways of modifying his 
explicit instinctive responses, so many degrees of emotional 
outlets. 


13 


We recall Mother Goose without effort, even long poems 
of childhood. I have forgotten my Latin, but certain Odes 
of Horace and that good old resounding Dies ire, dies illa, 
I do not forget. Not for twenty years had I thought of a 
certain jingle. I find myself in the midst of some girls. With- 
out warning, and to my surprise, I begin: “Briar, briar, lim- 
ber lock ... ” Where has this counting-out rhyme been 
these twenty years? 

There is no short-cut to learning, nor system by which the 
memory can be improved. Goose, Odes, Hymn, and Briar 
were learned, over and over: overlearned. We -overlearn 
many things in childhood we “never” forget. We learn much 
in childhood we do forget. 

Forgetting is in proportion to learning; the more we learn 
it, the longer we remember it. Learning is a soaking-in proc- 
ess. Some things must be learned many times before they 
soak in. The idea that we forget the unpleasant or the pain- 
ful because it is unpleasant or painful is nonsense. 

We learn to swim in youth. If we began each spring where 
we left off each autumn, we overlearned it. We can jump 
in forty years later and swim. So with driving nails, play- 
ing marbles, etc. 

We know how to swim. But vivid swimming memories are 
mostly accessories: the thrashings we received when we ar- 
rived home, the knotted wet shirts, the frenzied efforts to dry 
our hair. They were emotionally tied in. 

Every reaction we make has its instinctive and emotional 
background, its explicit and implicit factors. Rhymes, Bible 
lessons, poems, particular conversations, etc., remembered 
from childhood were emotionally tied in as well as over- 
learned. The emotional factor is of great importance in com 

385 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


ditioning reflex arcs. In learning to swim, drive a nail, recite 
a poem, these factors get tied together and work together. 

They become so tied together that one of certain stimuli 
can set them off. What was in the situation to set off, “Briar, 
briar. ... ” I do not know. It may have been one of a 


dozen stimuli: the general situation itself, something peculiar — 


in the situation, etc. This is certain: my overt act in repeating 
the jingle was in response to an adequate stimulus. We call 
ourselves self-starters, but we start in response to a stimulus 
whether to run, climb a tree, recite a poem, or think. There 
was some stimulus in that situation which recalled past ex- 
perience to me. 

J had been there before, as it were. We often say that, 
knowing well that we never have; and call it mysterious. 
There is no mystery about it. Some detail in a situation, 
in a room, in a man’s face, vividly recalls some past ex- 
perience. The recalled detail is so vivid that we feel we have 
“‘been there before,” have “‘seen that man before.” 

Memory does play strange tricks. But it seems less tricky 
if we think of it in terms of situation and stimulus. When 
we cannot remember our own name—and sometimes we can- 
not—the situation is one in which we have had no experience 
in remembering our name, or in which no adequate stimulus 
is at hand to break through other stimuli clamoring for atten- 


tion. Trying hard to recall it makes it hard for the adequate — 


stimulus to appear. The next morning the name may pop 
into our head. The stimulus for recalling persisted; there 
had been no adjustment. During sleep or on waking the 
adequate stimulus gets a hearing: the name “pops into our 
head.” 

AS did? ;Briar, Driale, fai 

Between the years we learned to swim and the day forty 
years later when we jump in again, arms and legs learn no 
new habits which make swimming mechanism hard to func- 
tion. 

The childhood lessons that are forgotten were never over- 

386 





ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


learned or were built into other learning. We remember our 
A B C’s because we continue to use them. But of the stories 
in the Readers we remember only our favorites. The count- 
ing-out rhymes were repeated so often—as was Dies ire— 
that the conditioned reflex chain was grooved. “Ene” was 
adequate stimulus for “mene,” and so on. 

It requires longer to learn “Ura, eyuk, ro, duni” than to 
learn “Ene, mene, mine, mo.” ‘“‘Ene mene” does not make 
sense, but it jingles. It requires ten times more practice to 
learn nonsense than sense material. And the longer the non- 
sense series, the longer proportionate time required; each 
syllable must become tied up with the one preceding. Hence, 
nonsense syllables are quickly forgotten. To relearn them 
eight hours later requires two-thirds of the original learning 
time. There is no such forgetting during the intervals in 
learning to play the piano or the typewriter. 

Boys quickly learn to swim; it becomes a habit more 
easily than skating. No school in summer. One habit is 
learned more quickly than two. Learning lessons in school 
formerly progressed slowly: practice periods too close to- 
gether, too little incentive. 

We can learn only so much of any one thing in one day. 
But between times we can learn something else. If it is a 
poem, game, or complicated process, we learn it more easily 
and remember it longer if we learn it as a whole. The way 
to learn Paradise Lost or a part in a play is not line by line, 
but as a whole. When learned as a whole it is remembered 
as a whole; when learned line by line it is so remembered: 
it is not so well tied in. We know a thing “by heart’? when 
our memory anticipates every reaction in the chain. 

It is the stimulus that counts. Rats, mice, guinea-pigs, 
birds, and cockroaches learn to thread an elaborate maze; 
even at the cost of pain if the stimulus be adequate. Hunger, 
for food or for the opposite sex, is the stimulus used. Old 
rats require longer effort and more trials to learn to thread. 

387 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


the maze. But no rat has yet been found too old to learn 
to thread it! 

Within reasonable limits, youth learns more rapidly than 
adult age; both learn in proportion to incentive to habit 
formation and uniformity of height of incentive. A man is 
as old as he is incapable of learning. 

We learn only if we have the incentive. But even the 
reflex time of knee-jerk slows up if repeated at once. A 
joke told is already stale, good thereafter only to the teller 
when he can find new victims. One lesson was enough for 
Eve. 

Memory is looking backward; of biologic service when it 
impels us forward. 


14 


“Don’t jump; dive!” FEasier said than done. We are 
organized on head-up, feet-down plan. We learn to walk 
that way. The first dive is a new experience: it reverses 
our feet-down head-up and away-from-solids habit; the 
water looks hard; there may be rocks below. There were. 
The boy never forgot it—nor learned to dive. No will power 
inside his skull could cause the nerves outside to forget their 
lesson. He could not put his whole heart into a dive. 

Some boys can; they have the do-or-die habit. They 
explore bottoms and dive in again. And again. By the end 
of the week they dive like frogs. Their sisters are just as 
good. Do-or-die for one is usually do-or-die for all in the 
family. 

The boy who learned to dive in spite of his first mishap 
succeeded largely because of it. The problem was different, 
more difficult than he had anticipated. That tapped a new 
source of zeal. He became a high diver in the circus. A 
net is not water, but the skill required in manoeuvring a 
head-first body in diving was available in learning to dive 
from the top of the big tent. 

There is always great complexity of stimuli in any given 

388 








ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


situation; the situation itself is always changing. A pig 
quietly nosing along a swill trough is joined by two more 
pigs. New situation now: the first pig gets into the trough. 

The family have just sat down at the dinner table. The 
door bell rings. Behavior of the entire family changes: 
mother jerks off her apron, father puts on his coat, sister 
wipes brother’s mouth, brother kicks the cat. New situation; 
only one new stimulus, door bell. The family jumped to 
the reaction: well trained. 

Baby alone went right on banging his spoon on the arm 
of his chair. Baby had just acquired that habit and found 
it so stimulating that entrance of stranger did not alter its 
situation. But the family now are suddenly conscious of 
baby’s behavior. Mother asks sister to take baby into the 
kitchen, knowing that removal of spoon will set off the first 
habit baby learned (crying till he gets it). Baby is not 
likely to lose that habit: no other one yields him such large 
returns. | 

We become Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde. Few can become 
both. We have our own level of organization, our habits of 
response to situations in which we feel at home. But Jekyll- 
Hyde was at home in two situations. His was a dual per- 
sonality. In one set of situations he was Dr. Jekyll, in the 
other Mr. Hyde. 

There are times when, to our astonishment, dog or child 
makes no response to name or other stimulus which ordinarily 
calls out a response. If we cannot predict a child’s response, 
how can we expect to predict the behavior of an adult? How 
can we know when Mr. Hyde will turn into Dr. Jekyll? 

We cannot. Even prediction of a comet’s movements is 
simple compared with predicting the behavior of an ameba. 
But there are some general principles that are of general 
application. 

Our response to a kick on the shin may be: “Well, Pl 
be. . .” That response does not follow if we are in church, 
even though the kick came from the same brother. The 

389 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


situation as a whole is a determining factor. The response 
is delayed until the situation is right. In Rome we do as 
the Romans do. Ditto in church, at a ball game, at a ball. 

The response is likely to be a repetition of one recently 
called out. We have not been to a movie for months: a 
friend drags us out; we go to a movie every night for a week. 
I have just visited a maple-sugar camp: I now notice maple 
trees everywhere; and see sugar cakes in the grocer’s window. 
I passed them by this morning without noticing them. 

A fire engine shrieks through the street several times a 


week. I have long since ceased to notice it. I do to-day: 


my fire insurance expired yesterday. I am all excited 
because I intend to listen-in to-night: the President’s speech 
is to be broadcast. I make certain that my radio is in order. 
At eight o’clock I have the colic: the President’s speech means 
nothing to me. 

My response to a knock on the door may be to open the 
door; I may lock it, turn out the light, and reach for a 
revolver. I may pray. Vast numbers of our responses are 
made with words. This doubles our response repertoire, 
complicates our behavior. 

Four brothers—a banker, a preacher, a paleontologist, and 
a bootlegger—read the news of the sinking of the XVIIJith 
Amendment: predict the response of each. The door bell 
rings, a man enters; it is their enormously rich Uncle Bim 
from Australia. The situation is again changed. But to 
each and to all situations an almost unlimited number of 


varying responses was open to each of these four men. And — 


is open to all of us. 

There are also two ways of clothing our nakedness—for 
we are born naked and are not ashamed of it. But the over- 
dressed man and the underdressed woman had the same start 
and are only happy when they are noticed: on the stage or 
platform, or in the pictures or a lodge parade. When a 
woman cannot make an exhibition of herself any other way 
she can start a dress-reform movement. 

390 


ee 








ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


Human beings, acting and reacting. The situations which 
call out reactions are diverse. The response any given indi- 
vidual will make to any given situation is a variant and ° 
depends upon that individual’s previous experience, includ- 
ing such things as cold toast that morning, the reading of 
The Marble Faun ten years before, a fight twenty years 
before that. Individual behavior. 

Yet, as Watson says, it is almost impossible for a balanced 
man to be so torn as to steal his neighbor’s purse or child, 
or to commit suicide or mutilate others. Such responses are 
possible only to the extent that the co-ordinations used in 
committing such crimes are in his behavior repertoire. 
Furthermore, his total reaction systems are so tied together 
that the moment he starts to commit suicide or a crime a new 
situation is created and leads to a different act. It is quite 
impossible for most of us to commit suicide; our conditioned 
fears and our unconditioned responses will not let us. Prac- 
tically all our suicides are pathological—diseased_ personal- 
ity. Suicide in Japan or China may be normal behavior. 

We are not mosaics of inherent reflexes and learned habits, 
but we are going concerns. How we go, how fast we go, and 
what we go in or out for, depend on the situation and our 
experiences with previous situations. “We act in line with 
our training and in conformity with our inherited points of 
weakness and strength.” The situation we are in dominates 
us and releases one or the other of our all-powerful habit sys- 
tems—we exhibit our learning in the manual, laryngeal, or 
visceral field. A cross-section of our habit systems in these 
three fields gives us a picture of our personality. 


15 


We learn new responses for adjustment purposes and in 
taking on habits are subject to factors which condition all 
learning. We become adapted, positively or negatively: the 

391 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


stimulus reaches us more easily or we inhibit it with less 
effort. ) 

A doctor asleep beside his wife hears only the telephone; 
she hears only the baby. But if the baby cries long enough 
he will hear it, and if the telephone rings long enough she 
will hear it. There is a limit to adaptation. Both can hear 
a mouse or a burglar. Most boys can hear a penny drop; 
most men’s ears pick up nothing less than silver. 

Tight shoes are only tight until we get used to them. It 
is the sudden drops in the temperature that we notice. We 
grow accustomed to change if it is gradual: bad air, bad 
food, bad government, bad wives, bad husbands, bad chil- 
dren, high cost of living. Life can make huge concessions 
if it is not crowded or pushed. As long as the breaking 
point is not reached, we can stand it. Wives at fifty will 
look just as good as at twenty—if the change has been 
gradual. We can become adapted even to lethal doses. 

When any given stimulus sufficient to set off the response 
mechanism is repeated, the threshold is lowered and the 
response hastened: we are positively adapted, favorably dis- 
posed. We are negatively adapted if the stimulus is grad- 
ually increased without increased or with delayed response, 
or if the threshold is permanently raised. If we fail to get 
up with the alarm clock we soon fail to hear it. 

We have a “hangover” after intense and emotionally 
stimulated activity. After a long session at cards, our minds 
go right on playing cards. We “pop the question” on a 
moonlight night after a preliminary warming up. Warming 
up lowers the threshold and has psychologic value in all 
fields of activity where we are out for victory. 

Why do we like certain poems, pictures, songs, melodies, 
hymns? I sat through a Georgia camp meeting recently. 
The preacher exhorted and exhorted; no one came “forward.” 
Then another old familiar air was set in motion: many went 
forward. 

Leaders—in religion, politics, and business—get “results” 

392 


ee a a ey 





ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


because they know how to play on us. We buy or bite not 
according to our requirements or on the strength of the 
' merits of the “goods” they sell us (for they rarely talk 
merits), but according to their appeal to our attitudes. 

We go to a political rally. Flags everywhere; pictures 
of Washington and Lincoln on the stage. That stage is set 
for us; the trap is baited. We do not need these settings; 
but they do their work: they make us favorably disposed. 
We cannot look at Our Flag or the Father of Our Country 
without being moved. Prayer follows: God, save America 
and bless the man who is about to save it. Etc. Then the 
_ speaker talks about Lincoln and drags in other matter 
irrelevant to his own fitness. And we are further moved. 
_ And with an, “All together!” we sing “America.” That 
decides us: he is the man we want. 

The successful politician may never have heard of “emo- 
tional tendencies built up through association processes” or 
of “conditioned emotional responses,’ but he does not try 
to sell himself to a Georgia rally with a eulogy on Sherman 
or ask all to rise and sing “John Brown’s Body.” Nor does 
the salesman try to sell refrigerators to Eskimos or the com- 
plete works of Darwin to South Carolina. 

Whether we are positive or negative all depends. But we 
are positively adapted for anything and everything that 
interests us. Whether a particular thing is to our interest or 
not also depends. We can learn. 


16 


The principle back of breaking habits is the same as that 
back of forming them: substitution. Substitute another. 
Sometimes it is difficult; the path may be worn too deep. 
Then it is a habit: if useless, a bad one; if dangerous, lock 
him up. 

A farmer breaks a colt gradually. He accustoms it to the 
sight of things, to the feel of things; little by little. The first 

393 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


thing the colt knows, it is hitched up. It is broken to har- 
ness. But a colt can have its conditioned fear reflexes. And 
when the stimulus comes—umbrella, locomotive engine, 
auto, red dress, any fool thing—it scares. One way to keep 
it from scaring is to keep it away from fearsome things. A 
better way is to condition it to men. With fear of men gone, 
the colt begins to have confidence when there is a man about. 

The human infant has almost no specific fears. Its par- 
ticular fears become conditioned and terribly real. They 
can be conditioned out, gradually. The old habit of being 
afraid of certain things or persons is replaced by other 
habits. 

As the weaning day approaches many babies take to 
thumbs. The thumb satisfies the sucking reflex, an instinctive 
act. But if the baby is not allowed to get its thumb in its 
mouth, the sucking reflex will disappear along with other 
infantile actions. Elimination functions are instinctive and 
many habit activities are built up around them. Such acts 
cannot be broken up, as can the sucking reflex, but they can 
be socialized and the infant can be taught continence with 
respect to them very early in life. 

Habits, whether inherent or acquired, can usually be 
broken up by altering the stimulus. Horses often show their 
fighting instinct by kicking or biting at a passer-by. But a 
horse which has bitten into a sleeve of cayenne pepper is not 
likely to bite into another sleeve. If the figure passing 
behind him is a dummy, and if his feet are jerked from 
under him as he kicks at it, he will think of his feet the next 
time he is impelled to kick. The dog which instinctively 
sucks eggs loses his appetite for eggs after he has crushed 
a cayenne pepper prepared egg. The instinctive chain 
reflex now reads: smell egg, hang out tongue to cool; instead 
of: smell egg, crack it, lap it up. 

Specific fears and other forms of emotion generally run in 
families; they are handed down, conditioned in. Children 
of lion-tamers, snake-charmers, steeple-jacks, etc., grow up 

394, 


ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


without conditioned fears of lions or snakes or high places. 
The son of a snake-charmer may go in for the ministry, but 
the minister’s daughter is not likely to become a snake- 
charmer. 

The child that has everything it wants is no more likely to 
form habits of thrift than a Hottentot or a monkey. Habits 
are not formed by uttering precepts. Nor is moral conduct 
founded on preachments. Nor a bad habit broken by warn- 
ings. But a little common sense and a few lessons in the 
biology of reproduction have not yet been known to encourage 
youth to bad habits and have been known to make for sanity, 
peace of mind, and normal behavior. Much of the drive 
behind morbid curiosity in the young springs from society’s 
ban on such matters. The ban itself only makes a natural 
curiosity morbid and adds zest to the gratification of that 
curiosity. 

Our erogenous zones, as Ellis calls them, function from 
birth: they respond to stimuli. The baby can gurgle and 
coo and smile when it is tickled or patted or pleased. The 
hug response follows the outstretched arm movement. Just 
where love comes in it is not easy to say. It does come— 
early; it does get conditioned into our emotional fears and 
hates, strengthening them, modifying them, coloring them. 
Especially into our attitudes, even toward a sunset. Our 
emotions get more or less saturated with sentiment. Often 
the mate-hunger impulse receives more than its share of 
rebuffs. These lead to definite attitudes backed by emotion. 

The lovesick maiden seeks sympathy and the lovelorn 
youth solitude. And few there are who do not know the 
meaning of shame, envy, hate, jealousy, shyness, embarrass- 
ment, pride, suspicion, anxiety, anguish, resentment, etc.; 
emotional habits conditioned on to instinctive tendencies. 
They upset us in dozens of ways; they make or break or pre- 
vent marriage; they are as much a part of us as our arms 
and legs. 

395 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


Emotional attachments are of value only when attached 
to serviceable or useful behavior, when called out under 
stress, and when directed to the big business of life. It hurts 
to be scared and we boil when we are enraged. But the life 
that always boils or is scared cold has little time for routine 
business of life. 

The time to break such hurt and boil habits is before they 
are formed: before the emotions have become specific for 
things, places, and people that are not changed by tears or 
smiles. Then we can talk of moral and political issues with- 
out slopping over into useless sentimentality or boiling over 
with worse than useless vindictive animosity. 

This is not easy. It is easier to allow our emotions to 
move us than to restrain our emotions and inquire: where do 
we want to go and why do we not move in that direction? 
Easier, because that is our habit. 


17 


Your family physician can put you to sleep with a drug, 
but he cannot tell you why you suffer insomnia or why you 
can walk in your sleep. Or why you sleep—or wake up. 

One popular theory solves the problem with thyroid hor- 
mones. Muscle activity generates poison—“fatigue prod- 
ucts.” Iodine is anti-toxic. The thyroid furnishes iodine. 
Hence. . . But inasmuch as the infant sleeps early and late 
and cannot be presumed to have generated much fatigue 
product from muscle activity, sleep itself was assumed to be 
instinctive biologic defense mechanism to prevent intoxt- 
cation! 

Which explains sleep just as much as breathing is 
explained by saying that we breathe in order not to become 
asphyxiated. We cannot commit suicide by holding our 
breath, nor by withholding our sleep. Breathing and sleeping 
are reflex acts which travel on their own. The muscle toxins 

396 


ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


were assumed. It was then presumed that the thyroid—or 
some other gland—washed them out. 

The vasomotor theory assumes that at the end of the day 
the center of the nervous system which regulates the size of 
blood vessels gets “‘tired.”” As a consequence the blood sup- 
ply to the brain is partially cut off. That puts the brain to 
sleep. Then we sleep. 

But is the brain robbed of blood during sleep, does action 
in skeletal muscles lead to intoxication? In other words, is 
there any basis in fact behind the commonly accepted theories 
of the cause and function of sleep? When we are tired we 
fall asleep more easily than when we are fresh. But the 
loafer does not have to be tired; he drops off to sleep at his 
regular hour—or any other hour. Nor is the brain robbed 
of its blood during sleep; the evidence points the other way. 
But whether the brain has little or much blood, the vasomotor 
change may be the consequence as well as a cause of sleep. 
Neither explains the release of the sleep reflex. 

Kleitman and Lee, working on a human subject kept awake 
for 115 hours, could find no evidence of general intoxication 
either in the carbon dioxide content of the blood, in blood 
sugar, heart rate, respiration, temperature, or rate of basal 
metabolism. The theory of intoxication at the end of every 
sixteen hours falls flat. 

Their experiments uncovered other facts at variance with 
popular notions about sleep, especially as to the effects of 
loss of sleep. After nearly five days without sleep, the sub- 
ject showed no variation from the normal in a large number 
of functions. He ate and worked as usual. His knee-kick 
and eye-pupil dilation reflexes were unaffected. So was his 
ability to do mental arithmetic, to name opposites, and to 
react to eye and ear stimuli. There was no change in his 
sensory threshold for electric-current stimuli. He did lose 
some control of the muscles of his head; it wobbled. But 
that may have been due not to insomnia, but to tired neck 
muscles. 

397 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


The subject could keep awake only by continued activity. 
An attendant accompanied him to prevent him from relaxing. 
Whatever causes sleep, its onset begins with complete relaxa- 
tion of the skeletal muscles. As muscular activity invariably 
accompanies and is perhaps the most characteristic feature 
of wakefulness, the probable cause of the onset of sleep is 
relaxation, voluntary or involuntary. 

Sleep itself may be due to fatigue of the highest centers 
of consciousness; but whether to loss of nutritive substance 
in the nerve cells or to increase of waste of cell metabolism 
is not known. The highest centers are those of learned con- 
trol and association of motor and speech mechanisms. They 
are the most recent acquisitions to the nervous system, the 
least organized at birth, the most modifiable from birth. A 
small dose of alcohol affects the voice, a larger dose affects 
the gait; but only a large dose paralyzes the respiratory cen- 
ter: that is a low center. 

In all the experiments performed, the subjects could not 
study after one night’s loss of sleep. They could do labora- 
tory work and mental arithmetic, etc.; but their highest 
centers gradually lost their irritability, as ours do after a 
long day’s work. Sleep restores this irritability. But just 
what else happens during sleep is not known. 

Dreams, for one thing. During light sleep sensations from 
the viscera or from outside the body may reach lower centers; 
they are older, better organized; presumably less subject to 
fatigue. Dreams are not critical. These sensations do not 
reach the highest levels of the cortex where only they can be 
correctly analyzed and interpreted. If they become so strong 
as to. force their way into the highest level and rouse it to 
action, we wake up. 

Sleep, then, takes the kick out of stimuli that in waking 
hours would receive attention and result in voice, thought, or 
motor mechanism reaction. But the sleep-walkers! Their 
dreams get into their high-level motor mechanism and they 

398 


ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


walk! Why walking does not wake them is not yet known. 

What wakes us? Stimulus from stomach, bladder, or 
other visceral organ finally becomes so powerful as to break 
through synaptic resistance and rouse the cortex. We are 
awake. 

Why do we sleep? What is back of sleep? 

But, first, what is back of life itself? Sunlight. The sun 
is the primary source of the energy of green plants; in sun- 
light they build up their bodies. But the light fails, the sun 
goes down. They had to meet that condition, to find the 
energy required to prolong life throughout the night. The 
problem was met in two ways: by living more slowly—that 
is, consuming less energy—during the night; by deriving 
energy from breaking down and so releasing the stored 
energy of their own body. Process of katabolism, or 
destructive metabolism. 

Katabolism, then, is an adaptation to the dark. 

Throughout the ages since life evolved, day follows the 
night. Throughout the nights, the machine of life slowed 
down; it could not build up its body, but it could keep it 
alive until the day came, the body itself furnishing the 
energy. 

We eat; the sun goes down; we go to sleep. The sun 
comes up; we wake; we eat. During sleep the processes of 
metabolism, especially the katabolic, continue. 

Ages ago, our ancestors did not develop electric organs or 
luciferase; they did develop diurnal habits. The nights were 
given over to the vegetative processes, the days to action in 
the motor mechanism. Having nothing to do at night, they 
went to bed. There was no other place to go. With no 
electric light to switch on, the wires to and from the highest 
brain centers were switched off. Sleep became a habit. It 
worked like a conditioned reflex, sunset setting it off. Even 
to-day, some find it hard to break the habit; they go to bed 
with the chickens and are up with the dawn. 

— 399 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


18 


Judging from their behavior, all our four-footed friends 
dream. Presumably their dreams are as unique as are their 
individual selves. I find no explanation for my dreams that 
does not take stock of my experience. Dreams themselves 
are no more mysterious than is any other phase of adjust- 
ment. Dreams and sleep are processes of adjustment based 
on physiological processes. 

It is assumed that dreams have a biologic function. “It is 
the dream that really keeps us asleep,” says Humphreys. He 
cites the sleeper and a lawn-mower outside. ‘The sleeper 
dreams he hears something else: if he “heard” lawn-mower, 
he would have to get up and go to work. “He can only con- 
sistently go to sleep by hearing noise as something else than 
the sound of a lawn-mower.” 

That explanation is too simple; it covers too much ground. 
True, many dreams seem to have the function of guarding 
sleep. But to say that the dream keeps us asleep is as lucid 
as to say that sleep causes dreams. 

There are dreams and dreams, and sleep and sleep. Some 
animals and people are always dreaming; some seem never 
more than half awake. But inherent in life and human 
beings is the necessity to “come to” when life is imperilled. 

When now I lay me down to sleep, what do I lay down? 
Obviously, not the same body that I carry to a Harvard-Yale 
football game. But the body that carries me to the game may 
be any one of 80,000 bodies in the Bowl. When half of them 
groan the other half cheer. One particular body may sob, 
another go into a frenzy of delight; another may yawn and 
say, ““What a rotten game!” 

The body I lay down may be so tired it is “‘dead to the 
world” and beyond stimulus of smoke, though my own bed- 
clothes are on fire from my cigarette. I do not come to until 
fire stimulates my skin. No dream kept me asleep, nor did 
nightmare arouse me. 

400 


ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


I may be very tired and yet wake at the low gentle gnawing 
of a mouse. I curse the mouse and try to go to sleep again. 
Why could I not have dreamed of squirrels in the wood 
gnawing nuts and have slept peacefully on? 

I have worked late and am tired. I must be up and at 
work again within five hours: I need every minute of my 
sleep. I drop asleep, and come to with a start. I have had a 
horrible nightmare. I can sleep no more that night. I can 
discover no excuse for my nightmare: no fire, no mouse, 
everything quiet. 

No excuse. 

I sit in my chair on deck in the sun: not asleep, not think- 
ing, not daydreaming. “Without a thought in my head.” I 
feel that I could sit there forever, the day is so fine. Sud- 
denly I am up and off. I go to my cabin and write for hours. 
I do not hear the dinner gong. The steward brings hot water; 
I do not notice him. He now knocks twice before I hear 
him: “Not going in for dinner?” 

I may know, I may not know, what brought me up out 
of my chair and started me to work. But when because of 
drugs, alcohol, or toxins, we are quite beyond reach of mes- 
sages from without or from within, we have passed out. But, 
as a rule, we are as little conscious why a particular thing 
pops into our head as why we have a dreamless sleep, or a 
silly, lascivious, or nightmare dream. , 

Sleep is primarily relaxation—general dropping off of 
the motor mechanism. But activity keeps on, though slowed 
down a trifle, in the digestive, respiratory, and circulatory 
systems. The bodily functions continue; the motor mecha- 
nism goes out of action, including external receptors for out- 
side stimuli. Consciousness quits, the mind stays on the 
job. Consciousness is a functioning of arcs of the cortex of 
the brain, where knowledge is stored and sorted. When cer- 
tain parts of the cortex are injured—by disease or wound— 
we lose control of something, as though we had quite for- 
gotten. It may be use of part of the motor mechanism, or 

401 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


the speech mechanism, etc. But with the cortex out of action, 
we forget what we have learned. 

- Roused from deep sleep with the porter’s admonition: 
“Gotta get outa here in five minutes,” we make a mess of 
dressing. Seems as though we have forgotten which shoe 
goes on which foot, and we blink at collar and tie as though 
we had never seen such things. We are not “in possession 
of all our faculties.” 

Hence, dreams mix things up. The right shoe on the left 
foot. A shirt means nothing. And we wake up the next 
morning with the “funniest dream; can’t make head or tail 
of it.” | 

Or, the nightmare wakes us up and finds us in a cold 
sweat. Nightmare behavior is jumpy behavior. The child 
terrified at dusk by goblins and ghosts and Red Riding-Hood 
wolves, carries an easily terrified body to bed and may carry 
it for eighty-odd years: jumps at every sound while awake 
and in sleep is swbject to nightmare. Such a body is always 
prepared to jump, until its hypersensitivity is educated out 
of it. This is not an easy process if the early fears have 
been branded in. 

A dream may be anything. If A’s dreams are wish-fulfill- 
ments, A apparently is a Spanish-castle-builder and keeps at 
it in his dreams. If A’s dreams are also sex, it is because 
A’s mind dwells on sex. As wishes and sex enter into many 
lives, they are likely to enter many dreams. 

Sometimes the frankness of our dreams amazes us. Life 
is frank. With the cortex out of action, we lose the guardian 
of our morals. The mind of the dreamer rambles around 
aimlessly and shamelessly. For the same reason scientists 
often solve problems in chemistry, mathematics, etc., in 
dreams; their mind was free from inhibitions, it was not 
afraid to try out new combinations. 

We solve many different problems of conflict just before 
we drop asleep, or we drive them from our head long enough 
to fall asleep. That problem is likely to form the subject 

402 


ee 


ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


of our dream: the body mind carries it on from the isnt 
where it was dropped by the conscious mind. 

Children and morons do not solve problems in chemistry 
in their dreams. As in waking states, they deal with the 
simple affairs of the day or of yesterday. Adults’ dreams 
may drop into childhood imagery and symbols. Starting 
with some unsolved problem or conflict of the day, the mind 
drops into earlier levels of mental functioning. Few of us 
go through the day without some early memory rising up 
like a ghost or blissful experience to haunt us or make us 
sigh for the barefoot days. In sleep the mind wanders, and 
easily and naturally into childish things or into childish 
methods of playing cars with four chairs, one dog, one cat, 
two dolls, and Johnny for engineer and Mamie for conductor. 

“My dream has come true!” Often they do. As I write, 
my body’s mind wanders fore and aft and up and down. 
It will be surprising if it can anticipate nothing of my 
behavior or my family’s behavior to-morrow or-next week. 
When our dreams do not come true—and generally they do 
not, for truth has little interest for dreams—we say nothing 
about it. 

“Prophecy lies in my name, saying: I have dreamed, I 
have dreamed.” 


19 


We land at Bombay, deposit our belongings at the hotel, 
and start out to see the sights. We need not move a foot: 
there are sights all around us. All is new; nothing seems 
like home. The very atmosphere has a peculiar odor, a 
different feel. The sun is not the same. The houses, trees, 
birds, shops, signs, noises, voices, cries, cattle, carts, car- 
riages, trams, are different. Swarms of human beings unlike 
any that we know; different in face, build, gait, dress, 
coiffure, foot and head gear, and personal adornment. 

Bombay is a new world. Nothing in our past experience 
kas prepared us for it. Suppose we have come to settle 

403 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


down in Bombay? We realize that we have much to learn— 
more than we can realize at first. We do not know how to 
act. Why does that man stare at me that way? What is 
the meaning of such behavior? We have no ready-made 
behavior by which we can adjust ourselves to their behavior. 

Even the flies, bugs, and insects are different. How are 
we to know which are harmful or dangerous? At the edge 
of a park we meet a little green snake. It appears harmless; 
it may be deadly poisonous. How can we know? 

How do we? How do we know the world outside our skin? — 

We enter the native market. Piles of strange vegetables 
and fruits. But nothing that we know. We see only certain 
shapes, sizes, colors. But what are they inside—sweet, 
bitter, mushy, hard, juicy? We do not know them. Our 
mouth does not water. Suddenly we espy a box of peaches. 
Our mouth waters now. We have a very clear knowledge 
of peaches. A rat runs out; we jump back. We have not 
seen a rat for forty years, but we have not forgotten rats; nor 
that a rat is not to be caught with the bare hands as a rabbit 
may be. | 

The first rat we met bit us; the first rabbit we met we ate. 
I know more now about rats than the mere fact that they are 
ugly and are to be killed only at a safe distance; and about 
rabbits than that they are harmless, defenseless, nice, and 
good to eat. But there was a time when “rat” meant no 
more to me than “hat’’; or “rabbit” than “Babbitt’’; a time 
when neither a rat nor a rabbit meant more than something 
which could stimulate my eye and provoke my reaching for it. 

Because we are impelled to reach, and when within reach 
explore, and because things either bite us or we bite them, 
we do learn. 

The world we know is the world we explore with our 
fingers, tongue, eyes, ears, nose, and all the receptors with 
which our body is so abundantly supplied on or in the surface 
or within. We know some objects, beings, qualities, and 
quantities, well; some, not so well. Included in this knowl- 

404 


ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


edge of objects are attitudes toward objects. We learn 
eventually to let sleeping dogs lie, and many objects, persons 
and situations alone. 

Don’t monkey with that! 

But we do. There is more monkey than rabbit in our 
inheritance. As a result, a lively boy or girl of fifteen years 
knows as much as the “average American.” 

“Is there anything that child does not want?” asks the 
harried mother. The child replies, “Nothing.” And the 
child that cries till he gets it answers: ““Why not? What are 
things for if I am not to be allowed to examine them?” 

It is a slow, complicated process, but after the child can 
walk it goes on at an astonishing rate. ‘Tireless, insatiable, 
indefatigable youngsters! “If I didn’t stop them they would 
tear down the house and burn up the barn.” Why not? 
They might build a better one, or learn a new culinary art, 
as Charles Lamb says the Chinese learned roast pig. 

Here is a baby. It has learned the location of its eyes, 
ears, nose, and toes, and can reach and grasp and handle. 
Assume that it has been “carefully guarded”—which usually 
means it knows next to nothing. Offer it a peach, pin, stick 
of candy, match, red-hot poker, cat’s tail, firecracker; same 
reaction: baby wants it. It may learn enough in one lesson 
to alter its behavior thereafter to each of these objects. Why? 
Because hot pokers, firecrackers, cats’ tails, pins, candy, etc., 
have their own behavior. Sooner or later baby learns that 
the tail of a cat is not a handle to a plaything. 

The first peach baby meets is, let us say, through the eyes. 
Mere visual stimulus was enough for the first lesson. The 
peach did not explode or bite or burn. Baby explores 
further. Peach can also stimulate the skin of hand or body 
or face; also the nose, the tongue, and sense organs in the 
alimentary canal and kinesthetic senses. By the time the 
exploration is complete the child knows a peach. Through 
the responses to the many diverse stimuli a peach can make, 

405 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


the child knows more or less of its color, shape, weight, 
hardness, odor, taste. ‘That it has a skin, that the skin is 
tough and covered with down, that the down is unpleasant 
to skin of hands, face, mouth, and tongue, etc., etc. 

Knowledge of peach was built up. Visual stimulus was 
adequate to provoke grasping response; odor stimulus pro- 
voked another response; and so on. By and by any one 
stimulus may call forth all the responses of all the other 
stimuli, because these responses are conditioned. While 
seeing peach, nose smelled peach, hand felt peach, tongue 
tasted peach, etc. Until at last the mere word “peach” on 
an empty tin can in the middle of a desert can be felt, seen, 
sniffed, and tasted—there may be no peach within a thousand 
miles. The response tothe label on the empty can might 
also lead to verbal response, such as, “‘I’d give a thousand 
dollars for a peach,” or, “I wish I hadn’t eaten these 
peaches,” or, “You are a peach!” 

The kick-back, the response the object itself makes to our 
exploration, is not only part of our knowledge, but largely 
determines whether we shall “pursue the subject further.” A 
child reaches out for a dog’s tongue or a cat’s paw: a bark, 
a meow, a bite, a scratch. If bite and scratch are serious, 
and especially if mother yelled, “Don’t!”’ at the top of her 
voice, we are likely to know barks and meows, and when 
such melodies stimulate our ears we do not need sight of 
dog or cat to complete our perception. 

We learn Bombay that way. We sample the fruit and 
vegetables, exchange our “good iron” dollars for their 
“funny paper” rupees, and take no chances with snakes. 
Learn to love mangosteens and how to eat a mango. Learn 
to distinguish Parsee from Moslem and both from Hindu. 
Get used to the idea of burning cowdung for fuel, and do not 
shudder when we pass the Burning Ghats. Etc. 

We learn life that way—building it up, building it up. 
We know some things well. Many things we do not want 


ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


to know; they bit us. We can even land in Bombay and walk 
through the city concerned only as a dog would be; in which 
case there would be other dogs, cats, places for food and 
drink and sleep, and endless things to be avoided lest one 
get run over. 

Knowledge is power, no doubt; but what does it turn? Let 
society answer that question for its own collective and indi- 
vidual self. But what I know and what you know is that ice 
is cold, fire is hot, rock is hard, hills are high, stars are far, 
candy is sweet, vinegar is sour, rain is wet, wet paint comes 
off, wood burns, he is a good fellow, rubber stretches, decay- 
ing flesh stinks, roses have thorns, money talks, shoddy is 
shoddy, fleas bite, glass is smooth, mules kick, bulls bellow, 
roosters crow, corners are sharp, eggs are high, he is a scab, 
she is worth looking at, Tut-ankh-Amen is dead, the razor is 
dull, they are wearing them higher, all is not gold that 
glitters, babies are nuisances, parents are easily led. 

“How do you know he won’t lend you five dollars?” “I 
asked him: I know.” 

That kind of knowledge is power. 

When the engineer turns the steam on he knows how the 
steam will behave. He has monkeyed with steam, he can 
anticipate its response. When the navigator leaves Aden he 
sets his course for Bombay. He knows the behavior of his 
ship, his compass, and the sea. At a certain hour of a certain 
day he expects to sight a certain light. 

Education does not begin at six; like charity, it begins at 
home, and at birth, and should never stop. But it is equally 
important to realize the full force of what Herrick means 
when he says: 

“There is nothing in our experience, there are no mental 
powers, no skill in ratiocination or logical analysis, no 
capacity to forecast future events, no flights of imaginative 
fancy, which do not depend directly or indirectly upon 
sensory data.” 

A407 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


20 


The astronomer figures a bit and announces that the 
diameter of Betelgeuse, a star in the constellation Orion, is 
200,000,000 miles. 

Most of us finished with stars when we learned ‘“Twinkle, 
twinkle, little star,” “Oh, look at the stars!” or, “Isn’t that a 
bright star!” We stop our learning of many things when we 
can name them. We know many situations and solve many 
problems by mere phrases: “Chinese eat rats,” “Sweet land 
of liberty,” “Dirty foreigners,” “Liberty enlightening the 
world,” ete. 

By the time we are ready to leave home we have a varied 
assortment of facts that we have learned ourselves; they are 
part of our own personal experience. ‘This experienced 
knowledge is the result of our responses to external stimuli: 
stars, rocks, tacks, whistles, pennies, candy, rain, trees, etc. 

Some stimuli are received by certain receptors, other 
stimuli by other receptors. Qualities especially are learned 
from stimuli to several receptors. Thus we learn most things 
as hard, soft, wet, dry, smooth, rough, greasy, sticky, etc., 
through no one sense organ. We learn that molasses is sticky 
not by looking at it, but by poking our finger in it; sweet, 
by tasting it. We know lard because we have seen and felt 
and smelled and tasted it, but neither eye nor nose perceives 
lard as greasy. 

At first we had no organized sense of distance. We walked 
into and off things. The baby falls downstairs until he learns 
how far it is to the next step. He learns. He throws a ball 
and walks to pick it up; that gives him a sense of distance. 
At the creek he “throws a stone across,” only the stone does 
not cross; he has not learned to distinguish distance on land 
and water. By experience he builds up a sense of distance, 
space, depth. 

An Englishman announces to his Colorado host. that he 
will work up an appetite for breakfast by a walk to “that 

408 


ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


little hill.” He has not learned Colorado atmosphere: the 
“hill” is 10,000 feet high, fifteen miles away. 

Our two eyes are not far apart; but my left eye can see 
what my right cannot unless I move my head. The nearer 
the object, the more each eye sees what is beyond reach of the 
other; the greater is the resultant eye-strain in binocular 
vision. The eye-strain is a clue to distance. As the back- 
ground also is seen as two images by the two eyes, another 
clue to distance results. The child continually reaches for 
objects just beyond reach. As a drunken man does, having 
lost much of his learning through temporary derangement 
of his “higher faculties.” 

Our eyes were evolved before print was invented: they are 
not naturally adapted for close-ups.’ In reading or exam- 
ining close-up objects, the axis of vision (center of fovea to 
center of lens) must change from parallel to an angle. 
Countless early adjustments of these axes are part of the 
experience which leads to sense of distance. 

A silver dollar ten feet away looks different from a dollar 
a foot away—its image on the retina is smaller. If I know 
the object I see to be a dollar, or a man, or a tree, I have a 
clue to the distance of dollar, man, tree. One gets a new 
perception of the size of St. Peter’s by standing at one end 
and watching a tall man walk to the other end. Smaller, 
smaller he grows; at last he seems like a child. “It is big!” 
we now exclaim. 

Distance and depth learning begins with the fact that the 
stimulus itself changes with distance from the eyes, and that 
every response we make with our: eyes requires action in a 
complex muscular mechanism. The photographer focuses his 
camera. As do I when I lift my eyes from my book to the 
clock tower a mile away: I must make far-reaching adjust- 
ments in both eyes. They are made by many muscles con- 
trolled by several nerves. I may not know I have such 
muscles: my body knows. Adjustment of iris alone involves 

409 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


three distinct sets of muscles that must work in harmony and 
at the same time. 

We respond to stars by looking at them; to trees by climb- 
ing them, by seeing them in sunshine, in fog, in rain, by 
moonlight, in summer and winter and spring and autumn. 
By and by we know trees. - 

And hear them also, with two ears. On a dark night we 
hear a suspicious sound. We “strain” our ears, turn our 
head to the right, to the left: if now one ear does not receive 
more stimulus than the other we decide the sound is in front 
of us; it may be behind us. 

Telephone bell, motor horn, railway whistle, footstep, 
mouse gnawing, bumblebee: we know these sounds. By 
their intensity we also judge of their distance. But if the 
sound is quite new to us, we can not judge its distance by its 
intensity. 

When a child, I heard a chick in a pasture field crying for 
its mother hen; I began to look for it. Every now and then 
I would hear it again. For ten minutes I searched, all the 
while becoming more mystified. I happened to look up: 
high overhead a hawk was circling around. The “chick” 
was a hawk! Its cry was so like that of a chick that I had 
been completely fooled. But we learn to distinguish many 
diverse objects by the sounds they make. We may walk 
blindfolded through a street and hear ice, wood, and coal 
chopped; wood, ice, stone, and steel sawed; hammering, 
filing, the drawing of a rusty nail, jangle of coins and keys, 
rattle of dice, rending of silk or paper, scream of a terrified 
child, “the car rattling o’er the stony street.” 

Without eyes, much of the world vanishes; but the blind 
man picks up sounds and echoes so far beyond our untrained 
ears that we give him credit for “‘another sense.” The 
woodman picks up sounds in the forest of no‘meaning to the 
city man, others that fail to reach his ears. But the city man 
gets even wren the woodman comes to town: he cannot hear 

410 





ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


himself think, nor knows whether the fire siren is a mile away 
or around the corner. 

The nose does its bit in our learning of life and things, and 
what to leave alone and when the other fellow should take a 
bath. We can get used to smells. We can also cultivate our 
rather inferior olfactory organ and without eyes or ears come 
to distinguish many cheeses, tobaccos, beverages, foods, salt 
air and all that pertains to the sea. With nose alone, in 
Manchuria, one can distinguish a Japanese from a Russian 
railway station. The Japanese are clean. 

We learn time by the passing events. We have our own 
rhythms for heartbeat, breathing, talking, walking, eating, 
etc., all of value in acquiring time sense. The stomach is a 
good clock. Where is the sun? Daylight, nighttime. The 
banks are closed, the evening paper has come. Or the birds 
have tuned up. Or the cocks are crowing. What time is 
it: how far have we moved? How long have I been sitting 
here: how much work have I done, how hungry am I, how 
tired, or how many pipes have I smoked? ‘Time does not 
stand still. We learn to move with it. 

The body itself is the great learner. General kinesthetic 
and special equilibrium organs in our ears give us great 
knowledge of the world. Movement in muscles can serve 
as stimulus as well as a ray of light in the eye. Before we 
learn to dance or play tennis or introduce the speaker of the 
evening, we learned to walk on two feet. The knowledge 
the body picks up as it walks us through life is a reservoir 
of learning from which we draw as from an unlimited bank 
credit. 

Some of us have no sense, but it is a misshapen, misspent, 
and unlearned motor mechanism which has no sense. 

Our senses often fail us; our perception is at fault, our 
experience incomplete, our judgment wrong, our knowledge 
insufficient. But to live is to take a chance. These look like 
mushrooms; the cook says they are mushrooms: I take a 
chance. Were they mushrooms? 

411 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


As the diameter of the earth is less than 9,000 miles, I 
do not like the idea that the diameter of Betelgeuse is 
200,000,000 miles. It makes us small potatoes. I take no 
chance. I say: “Bah! How does he know? He has never 
been there!” Or perhaps I ask another astronomer. He 
says: “No, not two but four hundred million miles!” I 
like that less than the other figure. It is “hard to believe.” 

Which astronomer told the truth? Both, it seems. That 
star pulsates like a mighty throbbing heart in a vast universe, 
expanding, contracting. It was measured at two different 
times, hence the different results obtained for its diameter. 

The immediate world that we come to know in our process 
of learning to be human also expands and contracts. Of 
many things we come to know more; of many things we 
thought we knew we come to realize we know next to nothing 
at all. But, expanding or contracting, the world we know 
is the world in which we live and believe. 


21 


From a sunlit street I enter a motion-picture theater. It 
seems pitch dark. After a few seconds I can see my way to 
a vacant seat; a few moments later I can recognize faces 
twenty feet away: the theater itself is no lighter than when 
I entered. My eyes had become adapted. How? 

In sunlight, the pupils of my eyes were contracted to shut 
out some of the light-waves. Inside the theater the pupils 
began to dilate, thus letting the light-waves fall on the outer 
part of my retina, the region of the rods. In these rods is 
a substance called rhodopsin (rose-eye), or visual violet. It 
decomposes—“‘bleaches’”—under light-waves as short as 
320/1,000,000 of a millimeter in length. Light-waves are 
forms of energy. Pupil dilation exposed my rods to this 
energy. As a result, a photo-chemical change took place in 
the rhodopsin: my eyes were “adapted”; I could see. 

The human eye is a complex mechanism of the general 

412 





ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


nature of a photographic camera in which certain photo- 
sensitive chemicals are excited by varying amounts of light- 
wave energy. A chemical reaction takes place. The impulse 
of that reaction is carried by the optic nerve into the brain; 
if we are not color-blind we “see” red, yellow, blue, etc., 
according to the length of light-waves. But whatever we see, 
the fact is that we are of the nature of a mechanism which 
is activated by external stimuli. During the reaction, chem- 
ical changes take place under conditions which transfer 
energy. The changes made, the energy transferred, we are 
by that amount and to that extent changed. Each change is 
registered somewhere within us, and to that extent influences 
all subsequent reactions. 

Those who lived through the Iroquois Theater fire cannot 
forget it. It is buried into their ,reaction-system and influ- 
ences their behavior. During those few moments the 
dynamic nature of their reaction complex received impulses 
that changed the quality and quantity of its sensitivity. To 
thousands the name J/roquois is a cause of excitation, an 
energy-laden stimulus calling out avoiding reactions. The 
theater was renamed. 

I am now in my seat in what was once the Iroquois 
Theater. I note the exits more attentively than usual, decide 
which is mine should “anything happen.” ‘That stimulus is 
so strong and memories so crowd my mind that I am hardly 
conscious of the preliminary music; it arouses no activity 
in the cortex of my brain. My revery ends when the music 
changes. My senses now become alert. I begin to focus my 
attention on the picture I am about to see, the picture that 
diverted me from my routine work and impelled me from 
the sunlit street into the darkened theater. 

Meanwhile, certain cortical centers of my brain have 
become the dominant centers of activity. They are now con- 
suming energy at a rapid rate; the arteries leading to the 
brain have expanded to supply the demand for more 
oxygen; muscles controlling the bellows which work my 

413 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


lungs have been stimulated to permit of the rapid elimination 
of the carbon dioxide of oxygen combustion and the rapid 
restoration of the supply of oxygen. Before the first scene 
is flashed on the screen, impulses of a hundred natures have 
been dispatched from brain centers and responses made 
throughout the entire bodily mechanism. And as scene after 
scene of “The Birth of a Nation” is unwound, new impulses 
are hurried along. 

By the time the picture is finished, I have fled in terror; 
I have committed murder; I have fallen in love at least twice: 
all within two hours. No part of my body has been quiet, 
unaffected, unchanged. Few, if any, of my muscles but have 
joined in; few, if any, of my glands have lain dormant. Cen- 
ters of activity have shifted—as one flees or fights, leads 
an army to victory or falls in defeat, or must remain in one’s 
seat while lovely Mae Marsh is driven to her death by a 
madman. 

The least active organ in my body was the digestive. 
Digestion is a complicated process requiring much energy; 
my energy was exhausted elsewhere—I had none to spare 
for alimentary canal. All I asked of it was sugar from the 
liver: sugar feeds the fires of hate and fear and love, and 
brainstorms. 

In those brainstorms—and there are many in “The Birth 
of a Nation’—millions and millions of neurons listened in, 
gave decisions, issued orders; correlating, codrdinating, 
adjusting the body, preparing it to fight, to murder, to mate. 
The body responded. Each bit of bodily machinery could 
respond because it was accustomed to respond to messages 
carried by the nerves of the body. The body grew up with 
the nerves. What the nerves know, the body knows: the 
nerves integrate the body and enable it to function as an 
individual. 

And yet, with all the excitement and needs of blood to 
brain and to the fighting-fleeing mechanism, the long intestine 
kept its rhythm, the fine cilia lining air-pipes kept moving 

414, 





4 = acy 
- . os * ae ro = at me ey ee a eS ee ee 
- i = =o = ee a ee a ee a Pe Se ae gS od al a ee ae ae ie eS iin 
oe Oy op i i Ser Se eRe Shr the manta aE aa Ra ai aa rn Mie ER Sk RAE OR Ghee oe a od Ee ne SDS nigh ee it Mt ge 2 ae SSS _- = - 


ton eer, 


i 


ACQUIRING HUMAN BEHAVIOR 


like fields of grain, the glottis never forgot to execute its 
complicated movements, however hard I swallowed. Even 
my empty stomach kept its place: it did not growl or make 
hunger-contraction gestures. 

It is the entire body that responds, the entire body that 
learns, the entire body that grows up. It was the entire body 
that recalled with bated breath the Iroquois fire, noted the 
exits, disregarded the music, and, spellbound, saw “The Birth 
of a Nation.” 

All living beings are excitable and must make adjustments; 
man most of all. Other animals come in contact with as 
many points of the outside world as man, but none can so 
vary its responses, because it has no such storehouse in which 
to store responses already made, nor so many words with 
which to answer back; none must respond to such diverse, 
complex, and rapidly changing situations. 

On one side of me was a Negro; on the other, a Virginian; 
in front, a maid; behind, a youth. What was “The Birth 
of a Nation” to their minds’ eyes? 


413 


CHAPTER VII 


FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE NEWER PSYCHOLOGY 


1. Instinctive Activities. 2. The Hunger Complex. 3. The Complex Appetite. 
4. The Sex Complex. 5. Love’s Coming-of-age. 6. Bisexual Behavior. 
7. Conditioning the Sex Complex. 8. Marriage Behavior. 9. Freud’s Devil and 
Other Psychoses. 10. Fake Psychology. JJ. Reading the Mind. 12. Measuring 
Intelligence. 13. Character and Personality. J4. The Ideal in Human Be- 
havior. 15. Socially Useful Behavior. 16. The Goal of Creative Evolution. 


I 


ANY attempt to explain or to describe man by a set of 
rules or by a special formula, or as cast in a given mold, is 
predestined to failure. Man is a something happening all 
the time, a going concern; he makes his rules, revises his 
formule, and recasts his mold in the act of being and while 
going. It is in man’s nature that he does not stay put. 

Human behavior is individual behavior; it is the indi- 
vidual that grows up, that functions as a living being, that 
behaves as a more or less human being. Genetic history, 
visceral processes, and somatic behavior are only phases or 
aspects of the same behaving individual. To restrict our 
interest to any one of these phases is to let us into human 
morphology, human physiology, or human psychology, but 
not into the whole nature of man. 

The blind men fussing around an elephant came to some 
interesting conclusions: the leg was like a tree, the tail like 
a rope, the trunk like a snake, the ear like a fan; but tree, 
rope, snake, and fan added up gave no real understanding 
of elephant. Nor does a lifetime spent in studying oxygen 

Ala 


FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE NEWER PSYCHOLOGY 


and hydrogen prepare us for understanding water; but a 
knowledge of water helps us understand living things, includ- 
ing vital processes in living beings and cultural traits in 
human behavior. In other words, psychology must take a 
very deep breath if it is to obtain a very broad view of human 
behavior. It must go to the bottom of life to discover how 
life behaves at the top. 

And yet psychologists and sociologists continue to attempt 
to force human behavior into specific desires, wishes, traits, 
impulses, functions, instincts, what-nots, rather than study it 
in terms of specific protoplasms which have had a history 
and learned their lesson. It will be instructive to look at 
one of these attempts. 

I select McDougall’s list of “instinctive activities” not 
because it is the worst psychology, but because it is bad 
enough to illustrate what happens to a psychologist when he 
cuts himself loose from biology. ) 

Instinctive behavior is blown-in-the-bottle behavior; and of 
that kind of predestined, foreordained behavior man has less 
than any other animal. Man’s really distinguishing trait is 
his capacity for modifiable behavior. Without that capacity — 
he is a moron ape, and not too clever at that; with it he is 
man, ruler of the earth, creator of human culture and so- 
called civilization. 

Instinctive behavior is the crowning glory of bugs and 
insects; we cannot compete with them in that kind of 
behavior—just as we cannot compete with the earthworm’s 
capacity to grow a new head to a tail and a new tail to a head 
when its body is cut in two. Ours is a higher nature. 

Look at a silkworm. It emerges from the cocoon and lives 
a simple life of from ten to twenty days without a meal, but 
with a mate. The female deposits her 500 eggs in a single 
layer in a definite pattern, on a mulberry leaf or something 
just as good for her caterpillars to eat. She has to do it, 
she cannot help herself. Miss McCracken’s experiments, 
reported by Herrick, show us why. 

| 417 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


The silkworm has a brain and five pairs of ganglia or knots 
of neurons, one pair in the neck, four in the abdomen. Snip 
off her head: the headless body lives out its allotted days 
and does not seem to mind the operation. The headless body 
can also be induced to mate and lay the normal number of 
eggs in the normal way; but the headless body can not dis- 
tinguish a mulberry leaf from blotting paper. 

Cut the neck off also—the legs go with it: she cannot mate, 
but she can live; and if already mated, she can lay her eggs 
but not arrange them, because she has no legs; but her 
abdomen tries to arrange them by twisting around while the 
eggs are being laid. Cut the first, second, and third abdomi- 
nal ganglia: she still lays her eggs. 

Which means: the head is necessary for choosing a leaf 
and a mate; but not for living or for mating or for laying 
eggs. The brain sets off certain instinctive activities involv- 
ing discrimination; but activities of the body segments, once 
initiated, carry on without the brain. Only when the last 
ganglion of the abdomen is cut is the egg-laying reflex 
abolished. 

Instinctive activities, functioning on inherited reflex arcs 
of nervous structure: predetermined behavior, instincts. The 
moth must fly into the flame—its reflex in response to light 
impels it; it could keep away from the flame only with a 
surgical operation on its phototrophic mechanism. 

Instinctive behavior is insect behavior at its highest; 
human behavior, modifiable behavior at its highest. Even 
birds have a picturesque repertoire of instinctive behavior, 
but the headless body of a bird does not live, let alone mate 
and lay eggs. 

Now look at McDougall’s list of our instinctive activities— 
with the “names of accompanying emotional qualities” in 
parenthesis: 

Escape (fear); combat (anger); repulsion (disgust) ; 
parental (tender emotion); appeal (distress); pairing 
(lust) ; curiosity (curiosity); submission (feeling of subjec- 

418 





FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE NEWER PSYCHOLOGY 


tion); assertion (elation); social (feeling of loneliness) ; 
food-seeking (appetite) ; acquisition (feeling of ownership) ; 
construction (feeling of creativeness); laughter (amuse- 
ment). 

There is a bird in Australia called the Laughing jackass. 
There is nothing in McDougall’s list that that bird is not 
impelled to do at one time or another. But whether it is 
social because it feels lonely, pairs because it is lustful, 
laughs because it is amused, is elated when it asserts itself, 
or appeals because it feels distressed, | have no means of 
knowing. 

Submission is not “instinctive” action in man, worm, or 
primordial protoplasm. Some of us know,when we are 
licked and when it pays to throw up the sponge and cry 
Kamarad. And some unfortunates with defective glands, or 
whose “instinct” of assertion has early in life been kicked 
or beaten out of them, probably do have “feelings of sub- 
jection.” Uriah Heep was so ’umble he cashed in on it fora 
while. But swbmission is no more instinctive in man than 
it is in wild cats. 

Much is made of the “instinct to hoard, with its feeling 
of ownership, of possession.” Some hang civilization on it. 
True, many are so in the habit of acquiring that hoarding 
seems as instinctive with them as it is with bees to hoard 
honey or with squirrels to hoard nuts. But acquisition of 
what? What is it that man instinctively hoards? Surely not 
capital; if so, it is a poor instinct these days. Only about 
four out of every hundred have hoarded enough to live on. 
The average Hindu has hoarded just one meal; that is all 
there is between him and starvation. 

Pick up your toys!—how many times does every mother 
say that. The instinct of man- and monkey-child is the 
same: reach for it, taste it, smell it, thump it, throw it away. 
But try to take it away—or a bone from a dog! There is a 
fighting instinct. One of the curiosities of civilization is the 
things people fight for. Boys fight for marbles; no mother 

419 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


has to beg her son to hoard them. Born with an instinct for 
life, at six marbles have come to have life-giving value. 

Construction? Destruction, rather. If we cannot eat it, 
we pull it to pieces. Sometimes this tendency to examine and 
destroy gets so overlaid with distorted habits as to result in 
sadism. 

We are born with certain instinctive activities and emo- 
tional capacities; the so-called human instincts above cited 
inhere in living beings. What seem clear-cut instinctive 
actions are learned or habit reactions based or built on some 
innate emotional response or on attack and defense reactions 
as old as life itself. And any attempt to describe human 
behavior in terms of such instincts is to try to catch birds 
by salting their tails; worse, it is to fail to understand the 
fundamentals of animal evolution. 


2, 


How does the baby know it is hungry? It does know: and 
if born of an undernourished mother, has been hungry for 
_ days and enters the world grub-struck. 

We speak of drives, impulses, wishes, instincts, reflexes; 
but living beings must eat or they die. Hunger is back of 
life, the primordial drive in life. And if life waited for the 
doctors to decide whether hunger is physiology or psychology, 
life would starve to death. 

The fact that an infant enters the world grub-struck may 
be the most momentous single factor in a lifetime of behavior. 
The way the appetite back of that hunger complex becomes 
conditioned may be the decisive factor in shaping that indi- 
vidual’s career. Without hunger and its attendant appetite 
there could be no genetic, visceral, or somatic behavior. 
Even psychics are believed to be subject to hunger. 

Hunger has led to crime, to suicide, and to cannibalism; 
and the fear of it, to war. It can make us feel faint, give us 
dull headaches and gnawing pangs—though we are not 

420 





FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE NEWER PSYCHOLOGY 


always certain whether the pangs gnaw in the head or in the 
stomach, or whether it is the mouth that feels hungry. But 
we can get so hungry that the sight of food makes us “‘sick,”’ 
or “too dog tired” to eat. But why a fast can make one man 
cantankerous and fit another for a spiritual life is as yet a 
fair puzzler. What is certain is that if the way to a man’s 
heart is through his stomach, the stomach is worth looking 
into. 

It has been during the last fifteen years, and more learned 
of its nature than in 5,000 years’ wondering about it. By 
cutting nerves, inserting balloons, and X-ray observations, 
Cannon cleared up much that was obscure. Carlson let in 
more light, chiefly by experimenting on a Czech who feeds 
himself through a tube in the wall of his abdomen because 
an accidental dose of strong caustic soda closed his esophagus 
years ago. 

The hunger mechanism is in the muscular walls of the 
stomach. The stomach itself announces that it is hungry by 
violent rhythmical contractions lasting half a minute, alter- 
nating with mild normal or tonus rhythms of twenty seconds’ 
.duration. These alternating rhythms continue for from 
fifteen to twenty minutes. If this call for food is unanswered, 
the stomach gives up and remains quiet for from one to three 
hours. ‘Then repeats the call. 

That mechanism and an empty stomach come with every 
normal baby. With one big difference between baby and 
adult: the time between unanswered calls is not hours, but 
minutes. The adult has already built his body and can live 
on his fat; the baby has to build its body. Besides, the baby’s 
skin area in proportion to body volume is larger than the 
adult’s; it loses heat faster, hence needs more fuel for its 
furnace. And as soon as it becomes active, it is very active. 
No action without energy. If the infant has to keep yelling 
for every meal, still more food is required: even an infant’s 
stomach cannot signal “more fuel’ without burning up some 
that would be used otherwise for growth or exploration. 

421 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


An adult’s stomach signals hunger from four to six hours 
after a full meal; the baby’s, within three hours—rarely more 
than three and a half or less than two and one-third hours. 
Thus nature answers a question often put to the doctor: when 
and how much? As much as its stomach will hold and as 
often as it cries for more. Colts, calves, and kittens grow 
up that way and seem to do well. 

We feel hungry when, and in normal life only when, the 
empty stomach begins its hunger-contractions. The more 
violent these contractions, the hungrier we feel: it becomes 
“painful.” Mild hunger is sensed less as pain and more as 
a general kinesthetic sensation. 

We have no specialized receptors for the many sensations 
by which we are aware of our bodily states and emotions. 
But the entire body-within-the-skin is sensitive to pressure. 
Strong pressure anywhere on the body is felt within: hence 
pressure receptors, or muscle or kinesthetic sense. ‘There is 
no special receptor for intestinal cramps, but we can feel 
them. There is no known receptor for hunger pains, but 
we never sense them as we do cramp pains in skeletal muscles. 
Colic pains in the intestine do not make us feel hungry. 

The empty stomach contracts. Its contractions are 
stimuli. The reaction to such stimuli is completed with food. 
What happens in the meanwhile: what goes with hunger, what 


are the accessory phenomena? The animal gets more | 


excited: beasts, babies, and men. Hungry protoplasm is 
more irritable than a just-fed man or baby: it can think of 
nothing else. Even the human cortex at such times has been 
known to get so crossed that only a divorce court could 
untangle the lines. 

Also. The heartbeat rises from eight to even thirty per 
minute. Blood pressure rises. Salivary glands more active. 
All of which leads to feelings—emptiness, faintness, rest- 
lessness, drowsiness, headache, even nausea. It all depends 
on the individual: intensity of stomach contractions, condition 

422 





! 
. 
| 
if 


FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE NEWER PSYCHOLOGY 


of stomach’s sensory nerves, especially the nervous organiza- 
tion or control. 

Suppose the hungry baby is not fed, that the reaction begun 
with hunger-contraction stimulus is never completed? Death, 
of course. Meanwhile it lives off its own body, suffering 
much at first, then less and less. Carlson starved himself for 
five days. He lost eight pounds. The hunger contractions 
increased in intensity. The sensation of hunger was strong 
ten hours after his last meal and continued strong for three 
days. Food looked good throughout the five days, but on 
fourth and fifth days he could forget food. He felt some 
mental depression the last two days, also loss of physical 
strength. But never during the fast was his discomfort so 
great that it could be called pain or suffering, nor did it inter- 
fere with his work. Mental recovery from the fast came with | 
the first meal; recovery from physical weakness, after the 
second day. He then felt as if he had had “a month’s vaca- 
tion in the mountains.” He thinks an occasional fast for a 
healthy adult “may add to the joy of living and to the length 
of life.” 

In a Carnegie laboratory a man weighing 134 pounds 
began a test fast. With no food, but plenty of distilled water, 
he lost 28 pounds in a month. He lost some muscular 
strength, but gained in sharpness of senses and ability to 
learn new tricks. 

The first three days of a fast are the hardest. Suffering 
thereafter is imaginary, due to fear or panic. “Voluntary 
starvation is in no sense a heroic act”; the “exalted” feelings, 
sights, and sounds reported by fasting ascetics are pure hal- 
lucination, thinks Carlson. Their brains are not more active, 
but less: they dream! Starvation changes the nature of the 
blood and the tissue of the brain. Hallucinations are children 
of the emotions rather than of the brain. 

If the baby does not like its first meal, it will refuse it, 
as a chick does a bitter worm. Man is born with sucking 
reflex and hunger mechanism; his appetite begins to be con- 

423 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


ditioned with his first meal. We do not inherit a thirst for 
milk or beer, or a craving for pickles or alcohol. 

All eat to live and some live to eat. We inherit a hunger 
complex; we acquire a complex appetite. Both hunger and 
appetite furnish their quota to prisons, but succeed fairly well 
in keeping out of the insane asylum. Hunger fills alms- 
houses, appetite supplies hospitals. The complex appetite 
has become an important factor in human culture and has 
even “shaped the destinies” of some nations. For details, 
consult an historical index under ‘“Nutmegs,” “Spice 
Islands,” “Opium Wars,” etc. 


3 
He is a “born hog.”” He may deserve the epithet, but there 
are no Suine in man’s ancestors. Human hogs are made, not 
born. Greed is not part of our inheritance, nor to the stuff 
we are made of has it biologic value. 

Food has biologic value. We are born with a hunger com- 
plex and of parents who know by our behavior when that 
complex begins to act. Their reaction brings us in contact 
with food. That contact—physical and chemical—releases 
the sucking reflex, which continues until the stomach signals 
“Stop.” The hunger complex satisfied, we are not hungry. 
The hunger mechanism retires and the infant can give its 
mind to other matters. Or, as we say, we can now get down 
to business! 

That “business” may be “big,” but it ends with, Where 
shall we eat? Later, What shall we eat? These questions 
are big business to millions of people—among the important 
“problems of life.” 

How are they solved? In relation to the hunger complex 
and the body’s requirements? Or in reference to a complex 
appetite which ranges from soup to nuts and includes corned 
beef and cabbage on Monday, fish on Friday, brown bread 

424 


SO ee ee : 


aS ee Se eee 


ill i ina 


FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE NEWER PSYCHOLOGY 


and beans on Saturday, and a gorge on Sundays, holidays, 
weddings, and wakes? 

The hunger complex is a biologic necessity and begins 
with a mechanism of special receptors in mouth and nose 
by which we distinguish noxious physical and chemical 
stimuli. We may turn up our nose at many things, but cer- 
tain things make us hold our nose. The bacteria of decay are 
enormously important in the nitrogen cycle, but we prefer 
our ammonia in smelling-salts. Nor is it without biological 
significance that our taster for bitter is thousands of times 
more acute than for sweet. 

We get “hungry for” this or that. What is back of that 
particular hunger? What is it that makes our mouth water? 
The newborn has never tasted food, good or bad: how does it 
know that it tastes good or bad. It must learn. It does 
learn; by the same process that life itself learns—by trying. 
Before many months the infant has tried out everything it 
can get its hands on. Its limit is the vigilance of parents 
and reachable environment. Whether maternal love is an 
instinct or not may be left to the doctors to decide, but there 
is no escaping the biological fact that prolonged infancy is 
possible only with parental oversight. 

We had the benefit of mother’s taster. When the pie was 
no good she gave it to the tramp. The mother tries it out— 
whether it be the four-handed mother in the forest or the two- 
handed mother of men. ‘Trial and error carries the infant 
far; and he may prefer the blacking on father’s boots to the 
blacking mother uses on the stove. But the food the child 
memorizes is the food mother makes. [If the first meal tasted 
and smelled good, and if the pleasure of a full stomach fol- 
lowed the pangs of a gnawing stomach, the infant has learned 
a lesson. 

Repeat eight times a day for months; and three times a day 
for years. “Like mother used to make” is good psychology 
because it is sound biology. 

The first meal was the answer to the hunger complex. The 

425 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


“‘set”’ of that meal was the conditioning factor in the next one: 
did it “taste like more’? If it did, the foundation was laid 
for an appetite for that kind of food. By and by the child 
is weaned: other appetites are built in by the same tastes- 
like-more process. 

So we come to like this and that, and this and that kind of 
cooking, surroundings, etc. But back of appetite is always 
an experienced or learned process: did it look, smell, and 
taste good, and did it “set” well. If so, we like it; we eat 
it with a relish, the memories of it make our mouth water; 
in front of it, these memories are real stimuli to the nerves 
of our mouth and nose. They are keyed up to such stimuli. 

We may not be hungry, yet the mere sight of caviare may 
touch our appetite off. . The urge is not for food, it is an 
appetite for caviare. This appetite differs from hunger. It 
also has a different quality from most other pleasant sensa- 
tions. As Carlson says: “the fragrance of the rose in the 
garden may be as pleasing as the fragrance of the roast in 
the kitchen, but the desire to smell the rose cannot be com- 
pared with the urge to eat the roast.” 

The appetite complex begins with memories. What is it 
that remembers? Cortex, yes; but the feeling is in the throat 
and mouth and nose, combined into a kinesthetic sensation in 
that particular region. The increased salivation and the 
heightened tonicity of the nerves of taste, odor, and of pres- 
sure, help to make the appetite complex. 

On a hot day we may sigh for a drink of water “from the 
old spring,” but when we have a taste for any particular 
water it is for something in the water: pure water has no taste, 
nor odor. Beer has both; an appetite for beer is appetite for 
beer. One may desire beer without being thirsty; or fudge 
without being hungry. 

Sitting down at the table does not shut down hunger con- 
tractions; eating does. With our first mouthful, gastric juice 
begins to be secreted—the contractions stop. But we must be 
eating food: chewing a stick, even of tobacco, does not start 

426 


a ee 


ee a ee eee ee 


FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE NEWER PSYCHOLOGY 


gastric juice any more than the sight or smell of food does. 
Chewing meat is good to stop a stomach gnawing. A pie ora 
pudding or a fruit is even better: that is why they end the 
meal. 

We all eat our “peck of dirt.”” How about dirt-eaters? 
There are, especially children with abnormal appetites for 
clay, chalk, lead pencil, etc. Children experiment; if no 
harm comes and they like the taste, they keep it up. Same 
way with pickles, mustard, pepper, gum, licorice, tobacco. 
Whether an appetite is “depraved” or merely abnormal de- 
pends largely on taste, and taste depends on habit, custom, 
social usage. Caterpillars, snakes, dogs, overripe cheese, 
sharks’ fins, “gamy” game, snails, frogs, toads, lizards, 
monkeys, grasshoppers, grubs, dogfish, brains, tripe, birds’ 
nests, devilfish, blood: all favorite dishes—somewhere, some 
time. Each man to his own. Tastes are not to be disputed, 
nor appetites questioned. | 

Man must-eat: it is his nature. When, where, what, de- 
pend on his nurture. Hunger is the best sauce. And the 
best hunger-producer is chopping wood. After that come all 
other forms of physical work. The body we inherit was 
built up by work, its functioning apparatus is arranged for 
work. When we do not work our body must make other 
arrangements. _ Civilization furnishes these in the form of 
“Institutions.” They are a credit to civilization. We shall re- 
quire more, for we are only at the beginning of “Progress.” 


4 


There comes a day when the gates to the elephant house are 
shut—must; as Mr. Freud would say, he has a libido complex. 
It is also called the sex urge. The elephant is dangerous. The 
urge is so strong that bananas and peanuts do not inhibit it. 
Sometimes nothing can: he gets so mad he must be shot. 

There comes a time when the farmer misses the sow’s face 
at the trough. If he knows the livestock of his neighbors, he 

427 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


knows where to find her. It may be miles away and many 
fences in between. She will be there. 

Laboratory tests have been made to determine the danger 
a hungry animal will face to get food. One easily measured 
is the crossing of an electrically stimulated plate: it must 
accept the shock to get at the food. No shock short of elec- 
trocution will stop the food-hungry rat. It will face the same 
charge for a mate. 

Biologically, rape and the theft of a loaf of bread are 
natural behavior; celibacy and asceticism are crimes against 
nature. 

The biologic function of sex is reproduction. In all species 
with sexual reproduction, the sex impulse is and must in- 
herently be as strong as the impulse to live. The mechanism 
for reproduction is enormously varied, but not more so than 
other mechanisms useful for food and oxygen metabolism, 
for capturing food, for defense from enemies. The mating 
cycle also varies with different species, as does the period of 
infancy, the relationship between parents and offspring, and 
the methods of courtship. 

In short, each species has its own reproduction complex. So 
far as the species is concerned, the individual male or female 
which does not play his or her part in this complex con- 
tributes nothing biologically useful to the species and might 
as well never have been born. 

Sterility in vertebrates is not more unknown than other 
congenital variations which distinguish defective individuals 
_ from the normal run. In states of nature it is to be presumed 
that all normal individuals play their part in the reproduction 
complex. Why this is so is no more, no less, explicable than 
why a food complex impels animals to seek and ingest food. 

The drive for food is backed by a sensori-motor mechanism 
which functions until food is secured and ingested. Food 
itself in the alimentary canal is stimulus or drive for further 
actions and reactions. But the initial drive was hunger: it 

428 


FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE NEWER PSYCHOLOGY 


was a potent impulse to reactions, thereby bringing about 
adjustment. 

The drive for a mate, likewise, is backed by a sensori-motor 
mechanism which functions until the mate is secured and the 
sexual act completed. Subsequent changes are themselves 
the stimuli which impel to nest-building and other activities 
which will be useful for the life of the progeny. 

Biologically, the chief distinction between the food-hunger 
and the sex-hunger impulses is that they function in different 
rhythms. These vary in different species, even in the same 
order of vertebrates. But in general the food rhythm is 
fairly continuous from day to day throughout life; the sex 
rhythm is confined to certain fairly definite years of the in- 
dividual life cycle, and within these years to fairly definite 
seasons or periods. 

A hardly less important biologic distinction between the 
food-impulse and the mate-impulse is that in one case the 
adjusting reaction is primarily individual action; in the other, 
two individuals of opposite sex participate—and only if they 
agree to such participation. Herein is an element of huge 
import in setting patterns of behavior, even in modifying 
structure. 

Species vary greatly in these two respects. In some, 
secondary sexual differences are slight; in others, marked and 
highly characteristic—as in most species of birds, many 
species of vertebrates, and the anthropoid apes. Patterns of 
behavior vary, from extraordinarily complex courtship proc- 
esses in some birds to next to no courtship in many verte- 
brates. But whether the courtship be simple or complex, short 
or prolonged, there must be the biologic equivalent of court- 
ship in all species with sexual reproduction. 

There are three biologically significant facts: 

(1) The mate-impulse is driven by an unconscious mecha- 
nism and not by any “desire of offspring.”” Whole species of 
animals mate and never survive the mere depositing of the 
eggs. The primary impulse is not eggs, nests, or cradles: 

429 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


it is for a mate. As in food; animals do not seek food for 
“processes of metabolism,” they seek and ingest food because 
impelled by food-hunger. That hunger satisfied, the alimen- 
tary canal will do the rest and furnish the voiding stimuli. 
So with the mate-impulse. It knows nothing of cubs, squabs, 
or children. The drive is for the mate. 

(2) The mere fact that this or that species reproduces 
through the mechanism of sex means that the two sexes must 
be different and must be responsive one to the other. In other 
words, in sexual reproduction there must be two types of 
bodily structure, two modes of behavior. Five tomcats in a 
row on a fence: the appearance of a tabby may be quite as 
great a stimulus for action as a dog or a rat. 

(3) Sterile individuals among vertebrates are abnormal; 
sexually mature but unmated individuals are deficient either 
in inherent mate-hunger or mate-attractiveness; neither group 
has biologic value. The food-hunger impulse must be strong 
enough or the individual dies; the mate-hunger must be strong 
enough or the species dies. The species only lives through 
its individuals. The individual mate-hunger must lead to 
action or there is no adjustment. 

In human organization sex plays its part as a determiner 
of certain characteristic forms of behavior. But normal in- 
herent modes of sex behavior, no less than other inherent 
modes of response for adjustment useful for the species, are 
subject to learning: the whole sex-complex becomes condi- 
tioned. Individual sex behavior is only to be understood in 
the light of individual inheritance of mate-hunger mechanism 
and the learned modes of response for adjusting the impulse 
of that mechanism. 

There are always: the individual; the situation. Both are 
complex in human society because the individual is capable 
of such varied responses and because society assumes the 
right to condition the responses. In every phase of bisexual 
behavior, certain unvarying biologic factors and special vary- 
ing social factors combined make up the definition of the 

430 


FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE NEWER PSYCHOLOGY 


situation. But back of the sex-complex is a fact-complex 
which must not be mislaid: 

(1) In bisexual reproduction the function of the male 
element is to release and set moving the energy stored in the 
ovum. It is the single ovum that is fertilized: thousands 
of male cells compete among themselves for the honor. The 
female is the older and more important of the two sexes. 

(2) The ovum fertilized, the male is free: to roam or to 
die; reproduction thereafter being dependent upon the con- 
tinued existence of the female until the ovum is incubated. 
This process requires 280 days of a woman’s time. The 
mother is always present at delivery. 

(3) After delivery, the woman also is free: to roam or 
to die. The offspring need never know father: many do not; 
nor mother: some do not. The offspring wants food. If the 
hand that feeds it is a black mammy’s and the food is from a 
bottle and all agreeable, the offspring will learn to love the 
black mammy and the glass bottle: and, like the lamb, will 
follow her to school or any other place the bottle goes. 

Of course, children “love” their parents; and’ will honor 
and obey them if “honor” and “obey” are conditioned into 
their response repertoire. The “instinct” is not confined to 
man. Life itself must eat, and learns to love the hand that 
feeds it. 

Parents “wake up” to the realization that their children do 
not “love them any more.” Exercising their “rights” as par- 
ents, they “demand” love, and call their children “unnatural” 
if they do not respond. A normal child learns to love any- 
thing or anybody associated with its love experience. The 
child does not love its parents because they are parents, but 
because they are lovable. 


) 


When a woman says: “I hate that man!”’ what does she 
hate him with? Does hate spring from rage impulse which 
drives us to anger when restrained, or is it the opposite, the 

431 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


detumescence of love? Suppose she says: “I hate lavender” 
—women do say such things. I heard one say: “I hate Paris.” 
Most women “love” Paris, some “simply adore” it. 

I love corned beef and cabbage. Sight or odor of corned 
beef and cabbage makes my mouth water. My mouth waters 
only when I am stimulated by something within my food- 
hunger repertoire. My mouth-water mechanism is made up 
of glands, muscles, nerves. An adequate stimulus sets it 
off. Call that activity tumescence (swelling). And note 
that I may leave the restaurant with a full stomach, and yet 
the odor of broiled mushrooms as I pass out the door sets my 
mouth watering again. 

J sit down and order broiled mushrooms. The first one I 
spear has a hair on it. I-try again: and encounter a dead fly. 
These are not pleasant things, but such make or break appe- 
tites. I have lost mine for broiled mushrooms, possibly for- 
ever. The very thought of mushrooms makes me sick: no 
mouth-water, no “good feeling” in the food-appetite mecha- 
nism. Call that detumescence. 

The sex-appetite mechanism is much more complicated; 
has more parts, more nerves, is capable of more devastating 
sensations. Call it the erogenous (love-producing) zone. 
This zone is all in order at birth. By conditioning processes 
it learns to respond to widely differing stimuli by the time the 
mature puberty glands begin to send their impulses to satisfy 
what by now is a definite and specific mate-hunger. 

Which means that by the time we reach the marrying age 
the mate we choose, if any, will be more or less already 
picked out for us. Romeo-and-Juliet is sound psychology and 
natural behavior. “That is the man I want.” “I couldn’t 
possibly love that woman.” We are so certain we call it 
instinct; and say that “marriages are made in heaven.” 

Maybe. But it is on earth we wake up to discover that we 
have married a dimple, a Cupid’s bow, a broad chest, a 
mustache, purple socks, a Roman nose, a blue dress, a trim 
ankle, or a head of hair. That, in short, we have married 

432 


ee ee a El cate i a a i gag gl 


FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE NEWER PSYCHOLOGY 


certain trimmings and accessories. And we go on through 
life buying magazines by their covers, cars by their colors, 
and coats by their buttons. 

“Things and places,” says Watson, “‘tend to become asso- 
ciated with organic responses, specifically those with love.” 
Every object, by virtue of the original bent of the individual, 
or through conditioned reflex or habit, calls out overt or de- 
layed response in the motor mechanism; also, “‘a definite and 
complex group of reflex activity in the erogenous zone.” 

Excitation in this zone arouses two fundamental kinds of 
impulses: 

(1) Tumescence: rhythmical contraction of certain mus- 
cular tissue and increased secretions. “If functioning alone, 
the impulse will lead to positive seeking movements and 
ultimately to the unfolding of the instinctive reproductive 
mechanism.” 

(2) Detumescence: inhibition, and relaxation of other 
muscular tissue and inhibition of secretions. “These im- 
pulses at the motor center, if not inhibited, would release 
avoidance movements.” 

Here, then, is the sex-appetite mechanism which early in 
life begins to sort the little world about into loved ones and 
those it does not care for. Through the mechanism of habit 
and conditioned reflex functions, objects which at first had no 
emotional value “come later to arouse faintly or overtly one 
or other of the two impulses”—tumescence or detumescence. 

To the objection that this view over-emphasizes the in- 
stinctive factor of love, Watson points out that the love and 
do-not-love factors are at the bottom of home, general, social, 
and vocational life. We work long hours to improve our 
position to make more money to carry on home life on a 
broader scale. “The activities centered about loved ones 
from infancy to old age are easily the most important factors 
in life. No wonder that our acts are connected with and 
evalued by the connections lying below our language level.” 

Here again, as always, we come back to that as yet unsolved 

433 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


problem of two faces: the significance and extent of individual 
inheritance; the degree to which this individual inheritance 
can be conditioned. Do our original tendencies make us, or 
our parents and our teachers and our environment? Or, put 
the question this way, Where does nature leave off and nurture 
begin? Nature never leaves off—we may be certain of that. 
Nurture begins at once—there is no doubt about that. But, 
as Watson says, as long as we keep up our sentimental drivel 
about children instead of looking at childhood as a problem, 
the problem of individual bents and capacities will remain as 
chaotic as it is now. 

As it is now, we are all tied up with sticky sentimentality 
about Alma Maters and hurrahing without stopping to in- 
quire if it is worth hurrahing about. We have a huge youth- 
cult; enormous and costly equipment to train boys and girls 
in the way they want or are fitted to go? No; “in the way they 
ought to go!”’ As one calls the roll of the men who have ren- 
dered useful social service, one is impressed by the notion 
that most of them succeeded not because, but in spite, of their 
“training.” It almost seems as if the best equipment with 
which to start life is a widowed mother who turns one adrift 
at eight. 

Born with an elaborate mechanism for adjustment, we face 
three doctors, two nurses, several servants, father, mother, 
aunts, uncles, etc., all on their toes to adjust for us. Nature 
never gets a chance. Nurture cries when we do not smile 
back. To make us smile, they tickle us under the chin and 
trot us on their knees and bribe us with candy and ribbons 
and gewgaws. 

And so our food-appetites, sex-appetites, fears, and rages 
slop over into endless things that are not to be eaten or loved, 
nor to be run from or killed. Indigestion—or adiposity; 
celibacy—or promiscuity; afraid of shadows, facts, and 
death; and war on our neighbors instead of against poverty, 
squalor, and ignorance. 

Love and such move the world, move it in many ways be- 

434 





FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE NEWER PSYCHOLOGY 


cause instinctive responses can be and must be conditioned. 
The conditioned response is our only mechanism for learning 
to behave like human beings. Love is a driving force of 
great dynamic power. But such grist as it does grind! 


6 


The newborn is a loaded stimulus for parents and com- 
munity. The nature of the load it brings will vary with the 
sex of the child. The girl may be as welcome as the boy. 
But the fact of girl or of boy colors the environment for the 
developing child. 

Suppose there are twins, a boy and a girl. Each may seem 
to face the same situation day after day. But, as society is 
constituted, each faces a different situation. The sister makes 
certain appeals because she is a female; the boy, because he 
is a male. Certain modes of behavior are expected because 
“You are a boy”; quite different responses are expected be- 
cause “You are a girl.” As a consequence, before they have 
a verbalized behavior they have acquired the manual and 
emotional habits expected of boys and girls. The girl has 
no inherent impulse to play dolls and mud pies, or to wear 
curls, ribbons, dresses, shoes, necklaces, earrings; nor has the 
boy for drums and other noise-making machinery, or for 
short hair and pants. 

The girl is molded to make “womanly” responses; the boy, 
to behave like a “little man.” Boys are conditioned to face 
one world; girls, to face another. The two sexes do not see 
alike because their eyes have not learned to look at the same 
things alike; for each sex, the glasses have a different color, 
focus, and range. 

Men do not “understand women.” How can they? But the 
reason is not because women’s nature is fundamentally dif- 
ferent from men’s; rather that ten or twenty or fifty years of 
having to live “like a woman” go into her make-up. 

Freedom of movement is soon limited for girls. Some 

435 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


Yearn to skip the rope and play jackstones only under pa- 
rental frowns. And as for climbing trees, playing marbles, 
going off swimming, “Who ever heard of such a thing!” 

Shades of limited freedom for girls depend on families, 
communities, rank, class, etc. But in the background is al- 
ways a general limit in movement, emotions, and language, 
beyond which the girl is not supposed to go. “Proper 
spheres,” “womanly ways,” “unmaidenly manners,” etc. 

The boy of six has a much wider field of exploration than 
his sister, especially if sister is “handy about the house.” By 
ten, his freedom is greater yet. He can stamp around and 
shout and whistle and scrap and “talk back” in ways denied 
to his sister. 

Because they must learn “nice ways,” girls have less oppor- 
tunity to learn certain specific motor habits and in general 
less occasion to develop their skeletal muscles. She cannot 
throw a ball when she is fourteen: she did not begin to throw 
stones at the age of three. Rules of habit formation and 
limits of dexterity are not inherent in each sex. How many 
boys of twenty could run a hundred yards in ten seconds flat 
if they had worn dresses and such accessories all their life? 

If it is “unwomanly” for girls to throw stones and run 
races, it will be “unnatural” for them later to be expected to 
compete with men on equal terms. 

A boy brought up on “Don’t be a sissy”’ will have a be- 
havior different from that of a sister for whom ot: a sissy 
is normal behavior. 

Men and women are emotionally different; by training. 
Tears, pouts, whims, tantrums, grow up bisexually. A boy 
of ten comes into the house crying; he has been worsted in a 
fight. His sister enters crying: worsted in an argument. Each 
meets with a different situation in each parent. The girl’s 
questions on current events generally call out special re- 
sponses from parents: “Little girls are not supposed to know 
about business,” or, ““What possible interest can you have in 
politics?” etc. 

A436 


FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE NEWER PSYCHOLOGY 


Men, to “understand” women, must be brought up as 
women: play dolls, wear dresses, be coddled, petted, pro- 
tected, favored, shielded, guarded, restricted, chucked under 
the chin, kissed. And thereby driven to such outlets as are 
open to women and have no more “expected” of them than 
men expect of women. 

“Shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the grow- 
ing child,” as Wordsworth saw it. There are two: one for 
each sex. With different opportunities, their impulses will 
be conditioned along different lines. Given different tools, 
their pursuits will be different. 

About sixteen years are required to train girls to certain 
“womanly” needs and desires. Thereafter it requires some 
one man’s lifetime to satisfy these desires. If women de- 
generate or go in for luxury, they are only following their 
bent; their training “fitted” them for such paths. 

Many men think such paths natural to women, and find 
themselves “‘adjusted”’ when they hang a diamond dog-collar 
about the neck of a woman who finds her life adjustments in 
luxuries from another’s hands. She has given all she has for 
all she wants. That is adjustment. Life learns such behavior 
as readily as other forms. 

The two sexes may “grow up together,” but they travel di- 
vergent roads. By the time they mate they are likely to find 
themselves far apart. Even words have different values; 
they may not understand each other’s language. But if their 
habits have not been abnormal, and if they retain the capacity 
to learn and the inherent love for knowing, a whole new 
world confronts them. They can begin all over again, and, as 
children, explore together to the ends of their days. 

After all, there can be nothing in a man’s world more inter- 
esting than a woman. That man is “by nature” polygamous 
and woman monogamous is biologic rot and has no more sanc- 
tion than the Divine right of kings—and will eventually go 
into the same discard. 

Are women as efficient as men? Efficient for what? And 

437 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


if not, why not? Why am I not as efficient as Charlie 
Chaplin, or Arthur Somers Roche, or Jane Addams? 

All normal newborns are efficient. After a few years, little 
sister can never become as efficient as little brother in many 
things. A woman requires a stout heart to dare to compete 
with a man. Her own sex says, “You should not”; the other 
sex says, “You cannot.” If women follow the “easy” path, 
it is because that is the only path in which they have been 
trained to show efficiency. 

If your water pipe bursts you do not need “efficiency”: you 
want a competent plumber. Same way in seeking a mate. If 
good ones are scarce, it must be for lack of early training 
which fits for mateship. 

Biologically, man must mate. Why men marry is a matter 
of individual behavior. If marriage is a “failure,” as we 
are often assured, it must be for the same reason that any 
other social institution “fails.” Man learns new ways to 
adjust to living impulses. 


v4 


It is biologically important that the sex-complex leave 
nothing to chance. It must function, as must the food-com- 
plex, without having to stop to learn or acquire habits. This 
implies a sensori-motor mechanism with preformed reflex 
arcs ready to respond to adequate stimuli. The original im- 
pulse for adjustment is within the individual organism. The 
kind of food the organism ingests to complete the hunger 
reaction will be conditioned by circumstances; as will the 
mate by which the individual makes adjustment to the mate- 
hunger impulse. In either case the impulse drives the in- 
dividual. There may be neither food nor mate within reach 
of eye, ear, or nose: the animal fares forth. The stimulus 
is an inherent biologic hunger of the body. 

The difference between an eighteen-year- old buying flowers 
and a twenty-eight-year- -old pe flour is ten years; both are 
normal situations. 

438 


FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE NEWER PSYCHOLOGY 


Ii is psychologically significant that children of both sexes 
are born‘with erogenous zones which from the beginning may 
be excited by tactile stimuli originating outside the body. 
This is in keeping with the biologically important fact that 
the sex-mechanism is inherently perfect at birth. The impulse 
for a mate appears later: at puberty. Meanwhile the second- 
ary sexual characters make their appearance. But the mech- 
anism itself is so built into our structure that inaction is 
biologically abnormal. Yet we speak of “‘control”; and dose 
youth with endless formule. 

One, I shall not soon forget. Ina class in Christian Ethics, 
we were being lectured on the “iniquity” of certain per- 
formances. “But,” protested one bold student. He got no 
further. The president’s face flushed red, and, shaking his 
finger at the boy, he bellowed: “Young man, such ideas will 
lead you down to hell!’ Perhaps. But it is yet to be demon- 
strated that the data of biology or the physiology of the re- 
production-complex ever led anybody astray, much less 
“down-to-hell.”’ 

Nature is not to be swept aside by bellowings or by any 
“down-to-hells.” If nature listened to argument and heeded 
threats and could be scared out of her boots by every man who 
claims to speak for Providence, she could shut up shop and 
go out of life. 

Man is a marrying animal. He gets married because he 
is born that way. Nature spent millions of years perfecting 
the marriage mechanism so that it could function on its own 
reflex arcs and give man time to use his head to invent cattle 
and corn so that he could have time to educate his children. 
Man comes along and invents prostitution, celibacy, and other 
sex-psychoses, and turns his children over to celibates to be 
educated. 

What happens to the sex-response mechanism between birth 
and marriageable age? Biologically, nothing: nothing is ex- 
pected of it. Usually nothing does happen to it to make or 
mar later normal behavior. Man is born so sane that only 

439 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


extreme conditions, sudden changes, or habits so distorted 
as to make normal behavior impossible drive him insane. 

The baby is rocked, petted, bathed, trotted on the knee. The 
erogenous zones are stimulated. “‘Nursing and fondling are 
not without sex stimulating effect,” says Watson. The child 
loves to be rocked and trotted. It forms attachments, con- 
ditioned reflexes. The baby requires 150 days to find its 
feet and toes. Another 150 days to discover its own organs. 
This is a real discovery, but the child shows no instinctive 
tendency to touch. But after these zones have learned the 
nature of stimuli and the child has discovered them, dis- 
torted habits may be formed. Their own developing bodies 
may become objects of undue attention leading them into 
emotional attitudes. Habits and attitudes take many forms. 
They may become so fixed and so perverse that the child 
will have no adequate mode of adjustment response to normal 
sex stimuli later. 

Sometimes normal physical development proceeds apace 
with weird theories of the functions of sex, driving in harm- 
ful attachments. The emotional wave which accompanies 
development, having no normal outlet, may be sublimated 
into art or any other emotional occupation; or it may be 
perverted and become a psychosis. Normal behavior in 
marriage is never experienced during some lives. No 
woman naturally hates men; nor is it in man’s normal reper- 
toire of response to hate women. 

While the original impetus comes from within, the 
adolescent child finds itself in a world of sex stimuli. To 
the growing boy all girls are girls: objects of special interest. 
Naturally, not all make the same appeal. But throughout 
life we continue to react and keep eternally reacting to the 
fact that there are two sexes. 

There are many ways of being abnormal, but no man or 
woman can be entirely normal for whom the bisexual world 
is without stimulus to normal reactions. Celibates, prudes, 

440 


FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE NEWER PSYCHOLOGY 


puritans, and old-maids-by-choice, have habits of inhibition 
or of restraint beyond the limits set by Nature. 

A bad habit is broken when replaced by a useful one. 
Childhood and youth are habit-forming periods. Childish 
habits stay with us or are replaced by others; but an old 
habit is not easily shaken off. As James said of Rip Van 
Winkle, who excused himself for every fresh dereliction by 
saying, “I won’t count it this time’: ‘“‘Well, he may not 
count it and a kind Heaven may not count it, but it is being 
counted none the less. Nothing we ever do is, in strict 
scientific literalness, wiped out.” 

It is natural for the boy to pattern his reactions toward 
his mother after his father, for the girl to “prefer” her 
father. These innocent tendencies may be shamed into per- 
manent attachments, making it difficult for the boy or girl 
later to make perfect substitutions. 

It is a boy or a girl that is born and grows up, not a food- 
complex or a sex-complex or a motor-mechanism for playing 
the piano or hurdle-racing. The boy or girl grows up all 
together: parts develop or rust with use or disuse. Fingers 
may learn to pick pockets as readily as pick berries. There 
are many ways by which the sex-complex may take on habits 
of no social value to the possessor and of no value to society. 
These habits are not broken by “Don’ts” or bars. They are 
backed by a high-strung mechanism wound up for preserving 
the race. When this mechanism does not function one way, 
it finds another. Nature backs it; training prepares the 
channel into which it will direct its energy. 


8 


There are many histories of marriage. Westermark’s, in 
three large volumes, is a mere sketch and was out of date 
the day it was printed. New marriage customs have been 
invented. 

Marriage does not stand still. It grows—backward, for- 

441 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


ward, up and down. There are as many forms of marriage 
behavior as there are married couples. Possibly more: 
some dissolve and remarry. Marriage laws vary from state 
to state, nation to nation, age to age. Can marriage behavior 
be generalized or reduced to law? 

There is no biologic excuse outside structural deficiency 
for unmated adult human beings. Many human societies 
respect that law. Other communities flaunt it, disregard 
puberty, indefinitely postpone mating or mate casually, and 
make the best of children as they do of other accidents. 

In other words, we get little light on human marriage 
behavior from the Mind of the ameba or the Social Instincts 
of the anthropoid apes. Human marriage behavior is as 
distinctly and peculiarly human as is a sewing machine or 
the ““Wedding March” of Lohengrin. The mate instinct must 
be there: is there. If we are born whole, we have it: the 
capacity to seek a mate, the impulse to find one if it takes 
us overseas. 

Why, then, a world of sexually unadjusted: unmarrieds, 
divorcés, oft-marrieds, courtesans, prostitutes, homosexuals, 
asexuals, dog-lovers, snake-charmers, cadets, loveless mar- 
riages, childless marriages? Endless kinds. 

Two general observations: (1) Europe’s population has 
doubled in the last hundred years despite the enormous 
losses from wars, disease, infantile mortality, and drains 
overseas. The mate-hunger is not impotent. (2) We hear 
only of the sexually-unadjusted. There are millions of 
happily mated couples in America who find no fault with 
nature’s marriage laws or those recorded in codes. 

Now for the other side: the behavior of the mate-impulse. 
It leads many to marry. The marriage fails: drunkenness, 
cruelty, infidelity, desertion, etc. The courts recognize 
many grounds. Why does one man become a drunkard, 
another beat his wife? Marriage itself is no more respon- 
sible for such misfits than is business for arson or banking 
for defalcation. The man who beats his wife probably beat 

442 


FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE NEWER PSYCHOLOGY 


his sister or his mother. The man who drinks because or in 
spite of his wife would turn to drink under any other situa- 
tion to which he could not adjust himself. 

A larger mismated group is based on the polygamous 
habits of one or the other, generally the man. In sowing 
wild oats he scattered the energy with which he was endowed 
to secure a mate; and acquired the polygamous habit. After 
marriage he may acquire the monogamous habit; he may 
not—his emotional nature will not so easily find sufficient 
outlet in one woman. He also learned another habit: that 
he could get what he wanted only if he translated his wish 
into action. That lesson has great value, but is of no use 
in marriage unless he wants to be faithful to one womar. 
To make that want effective he has to break himself of an 
emotionally-reinforced habit. 

The other side of that picture is the woman whose early 
mate-hunger was put on ice by a prudish mother. If she 
is brought up on kisses and kisses all her girl friends every 
time she sees them, she wastes a lot of emotion of biologic 
value. She overflows with sentimentality and has no love 
left for anybody. Or she grows up a “pure and innocent 
girl.” She has no adequate response in a situation where 
a mate is wanted. Sheer ignorant “innocence” is no match 
in a situation where the man knows too much. Neither senti- 
mentality nor ice is fit response for the facts and emotions 
of sex. 

Between the age of fifteen and twenty-five are ten long 
years. During these years the mate-hunger impulse cannot 
be put to sleep, as one does a child; or locked in a closet, 
as one does—but should not—a naughty child. It is 
inevitable that huge amounts of energy be diverted. But 
where? What is to be its outlet? 

“Raise the standard of men’s morality!” But not by talk. 
Work will do it. Many a boy is so hard at work he has no 
further energy left. His sex-impulse is expended in life- 

443 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


impulse activities. Girls begin to find outlets for their 
energy in action, in sports and games, and in the broader 
affairs of life interests. All-night dances can dissipate a 
lot of energy for both sexes. 

The boy or girl who for ten years chases pleasure as the 
main business of life may be “pure,” but neither will be 
likely to acquire any socially useful habits during that time. 
Both men and women can become such habitual flirts that 
they are abnormal; they are sexual perverts. 

The normal sex-complex can be broken in many ways: 
disappointment in love, no response on the part of the mate, 
etc. The sex-complex thus becomes conditioned to abnormal 
raethods of response: tendency to avoid or be disgusted under 
conditions which are neither “disgusting” nor to be avoided; 
prudishness; sloppy sentimentality; morbid interest in the 
externals or accessories of sex conduct. 

The sex-complex thus comes to mean for one individual 
one thing; for another, quite something else. It comes to be 
as varied as behavior itself. What it is at any one time 
depends on the lessons it has learned: its experience, its 
habits. No man or woman enters into marriage with a sex- 
complex slate on which something has not been written. 
Until recently, it was likely to be too little on the part of 
the woman, an ignorance so ingrained that learning was 
painful; too much on the part of the man, more than he could 
rub off. 

Foundations of habits (which means character) are laid 
in homes. Nine-tenths of the girls that enter juvenile courts 
leave bad homes. As Thomas puts it, many a girl cannot 
be said to fall, because she has never risen. She is not 
immoral, but a-moral. The mate-hunger is turned into love 
for adventure, clothes, theater, attention, distinction, freedom. 
And some discover that the only means they have to realize 
these acquired appetites is their sex. They use it as they 
would a coin to buy advantage and pleasure. Thomas cites 

444 


FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE NEWER PSYCHOLOGY 


Dumas as saying that girls in Paris lost their virginity as 
they lost their milk teeth: they could give no plausible account 
of the loss. | 

Or they marry with that same coin or buy entrée to the 
stage or a trip to Paris. Having chosen the easier road, 
they soon become habituated to it. Until recently, women 
had almost no incentive or opportunity to attempt achieve- 
ment in male fields. Why should she when for every woman 
there was a purchaser; for some, many bidders. 

Until recently, it was a woman-made world we lived in. 
The mere male had to go outside that world to work off his 
surplus energy. The wife-mother was the center of the 
home and it was to her interest to make it a real center. It 
became a hive of industry and a swarm of children. What- 
ever glorified it magnified her importance. Within, she was 
supreme. In this woman-made world men passed half their 
lives; the other half was spent in bringing home the bacon. 

Women generally married for love, as they do now if their 
mate-hunger is unimpaired and they are free to marry the 
“man of their choice.” There were three categories of 
women: married, old maids, and “fallen.” Thousands of 
American communities had no “fallen” and next to no old 
maids. 

Now women have their “rights.” In obtaining “rights” 
she abdicated a throne: she no longer rules by divine right. 
The children that “bless the home” are turned over to the 
nurse while mother presides at bridge, over Conventions for 
the Proper Care of Children, over Committees to Cleanse 
the Slums. Result: males no longer naively accept matri- 
mony or implicitly trust their wives; females turn to 
matrimony if they have nowhere else to turn. 

All this, of course, makes for “progress.” But in our 
social progress we have acquired special schools where boys 
may learn to be pimps and girls to be prostitutes, and slums 
which in squalor, vermin, filth, and disease, and in the num- 

445 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


ber of their dope-fiends, pickpockets, paupers, degenerates, 
hags, and harlots, are quite as “advanced” as those of Paris 
or London. It is no longer necessary to go abroad to see 
“life”; Babylon has moved to Main Street. 

Social conditions are changing, but the average American 
girl still approaches her majority fitted for no economically 
independent career. Brought up as a social parasite, it is 
her belief and the all-around understanding that marriage 
is her career. For that no special preparation is deemed 
necessary. She is a girl: what more can one ask? Few 
men ask more. Some do not get a whole woman. More 
rarely does the woman get a whole man. But sauce for the 
goose is not sauce for the gander in these days of holeproof 
socks, built-in beds, meals out, and no babies allowed; the 
gander may feel that as meal ticket he is entitled to a dif- 
ferent brand of sauce. 

To say that the mate-hunger is greater in one sex than in 
the other is nonsense. It takes different forms in the two 
sexes because of training and the situation. Nor are men 
less fond of children than are women. Having wider inter- 
ests, they are bored sooner. In the divorce court the man 
fights as hard as the woman for the children. If there is 
any radical difference in sex-morality or marriage behavior— 
or any other kind of behavior—in the two sexes, the cause 
will be found in the way the two sexes become trained and 
organized for life and in the demands society makes on 
them; not in their inherent impulses. 

Mamie, don’t be a tomboy! 

Many a mother these days nearly “dies of shame” when 
Mamie bobs her hair and marches off in the garb of a Girl 
Scout. ‘Girls didn’t do such outlandish things in my day!” 
They did not. We have to learn anew what our stone-ax 
ancestors knew: girls can be as “outlandish” as boys! The 
girls themselves are just beginning to discover it. Marriage 
behavior is in for further conditioning. The sex-complex 
may become simple again. 

446 


ee ee ee ee Pe 





FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE NEWER PSYCHOLOGY 


Y 


A psychosis is a morbid mental state. We all have our 
little psychoses. That so few have big psychoses, that so 
few asylums are required to house the mentally unbalanced, 
is a tribute to our sound inheritance and our capacity to 
preserve our balance in increasingly complex situations and 
an environment which changes faster than man can change 
his mind. 

My chief psychosis is, let us say, a morbid love for dogs. 
I “shudder with horror” at the sight of a dog-fight. I loathe 
the dog-pound and am the deadly enemy of the dog-catcher. 
I defy the muzzle law—openly when I dare. I endow hos- 
pitals for unadjusted dogs and cemeteries for dead ones. In | 
short, I am “crazy” about dogs. But as I am not a menace 
to society, I am tolerated, even encouraged by “sympa- 
thizers.”’ | 

My own darling Fido dies. Now I am crazy. I buy a 
satin-lined silver coffin with gold handles. I have a cere- 
mony. Rites at the grave. Flowers. Et cetera. I spend 
dry-eyed stony-stared hours at the grave. I refuse to go 
home. I refuse to eat. My friends remonstrate: I heed 
them not. It rains: I pay no attention. Nothing from the 
outside world moves me. I am mad asa March hare. Ambu- 
lance. Psychopathic ward. What “possessed” me? The 
church calls it “devil” or The Devil. Freud calls it 
“Unconscious.” 

There are as many kinds and degrees of psychoses as 
there are of indigestion. There are few perennially sound 
‘minds in perennially sound bodies; few of us that are not 
off our balance or off our feed now and then. Sometimes 
it is serious. When we are off our balance, society suffers; 
when we are off our feed, we suffer. Society expects us to 
behave. And properly locks us up when our behavior is 
dangerous. But if we die of indigestion, society is not 
interested. 

447 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


There are those who cry when they hear a dog howling, 
smile when it wags its tail: the wail or gurgle of an infant 
means nothing to them. Some children are thrown into 
paroxysms of fear by a dog or a fur coat. Some cower from 
lightning, and when the thunder roars overhead shut them- 
selves up in a closet. I dodge an imaginary pump-handle 


as I go by a certain spot. Few women would touch a snake - 


for “worlds”; some love and make pets of them. Some go 
miles to see a prize-fight and are disappointed if no blood 
flows. Whole nations go to bull-fights, knowing they will 
see streams of blood. Some women faint at the mere sight 
of blood; an English woman is insulted at the mention of it. 

Psychoses? In a way. Such forms of behavior are not 
“natural”: they are no .part of our inheritance. Every 
peculiarity or abnormality of behavior and every psychosis 
can be described in terms of individual experience. 

It is the emotional side that bulges in psychoses: we 
“adore,” we “love,” we are “passionately fond of,” birds, 
cats, dogs, bull-fights, pink tights, Niagara Falls, Caruso, the 
night boat to Albany. Some “love” half the world of things 
and all the world of beings. Others are as devoted to their 
hates: they have dozens of ways for hating things and people. 
Extreme and lurid fears are the third of the three emotional 
Graces. A Grace in disgrace is a psychosis. 

Whole nations get that way. We recently hated all Ger- 
many, even “German silver” and:Dachshunds; and loved the 
French, down to snails and frogs’ legs. We cheered at the 
movies when we saw a German killed, applauded when we 
saw a Frenchman kiss an American officer. The whole 
“civilized” world suffered a huge psychosis: a kill-’em-love- 
’em complex. 

Freudian psychoses are planted in infancy and are sexual. 
Freud even went so far as to say that every dream is a “wish- 
fulfiller” and has its feet on the forbidden pleasures of 
childhood. 

The business of the sex-impulse is mating; if the two sexes 

448 


FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE NEWER PSYCHOLOGY 


do not pair, the sex-impulse has not attended to its business 
and is a biologic failure. Many do not pair, few live happily 
ever after; the sex-impulse has attended to everything except 
its own business. Being denied proper outlet, it disarranges 
society and long ago became the dominant force in human 
behavior. By the time Freud is through, life is Sex. The 
drive in life is love, Libido. “Thwarted libido” is respon- 
sible for all the trouble. 

That sounded interesting and Freudism became a fad; 
then, a cult; and is now a disease and should be put out of 
its misery. | 

Here is the argument. The newborn comes into the world 
naked and unashamed. The world says: “That’s not nice; 
you must not do that.” That begins the Conflict: animal 
instinct versus social Don'ts. But instinctive “I wants’ are 
not to be laid by “Don’ts.” What then? “Substitutes.” 
The young “mind” indulges its instinctive libido by symbols, 
Society’s substitutes for nature’s actions. 

For Freud, “mind” is stuff, a product of the processes of 
development. Certain forces determine the trend of this 
development. By “psycho-analysis” this “mind” can be 
examined—as one examines the contents of a jug. Such 
examination will reveal the manner in which these deter- 
mining forces have acted and reacted. 

But the mind is like a jug with much sediment below the 
thin skim-milk on top. The sediment is the Unconscious 
Mind, thick with repressed instinctive impulses and “I want” 
memories. This stuff is a source of energy, loaded, always 
smoldering; it exerts influence. It is a hidden drive to action 
no less than the libido impulse itself. 

Do the “repressions” ever rise to Consciousness? Only 
when disguised or distorted—as they always are in dreams. 
In dreams they “rise.” But we do not know them, they are 
so distorted, so symbolized. We must have a dream-book— 
there are such; or we must go to a psycho-analyst—there are 
such. They can exorcise our big and little devils. 

449 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


There are many physiologic and psychologic processes of 
ameba and man which are not well understood, but Libido, 
Unconscious Mind, Symbolism, or Idea, as source of energy, 
is devil pure and impure. It is worse than feeding unknown 
hormones to cure unknown diseases. 

Science must formulate hypotheses—and proceed to test 
them. But progress is not made by assuming that spanking 
a child drives a libido to parts unknown which later will 
jump up like a Jack-in-the-box to scare the man or woman to 
death. | 

There are neuroses and psychoses: some with organic 
lesions; some, morbid habit systems. The personality is 
diseased: certain habits become so distorted that the indi- 
vidual’s useful habits do not suffice to adjust him to his 
environment—home, society. These distortions usually start 
in childhood: the child is spoiled, petted, babied, indulged; 
learns to respond with lies, by cheating, by evasion; never 
learns to accept responsibility for misdeeds. Such an one 
may go through life with such habits. But let a crisis come, 
a change for which he has no serviceable habits of response! 
There are shades of unadjustment: instinctive behavior that 
has never been taught to “behave,” emotions that have 
become so distorted as to be of no use to human society. 
With inadequate adjusting mechanism, they turn to such 
pursuits or practices as fall within the range of their capacity 
to adjust. 

No child is a “born liar.” But a lively youngster may 
become a proficient one in ten or less years, driven to learn 
the art because parents will be parents and boys will be boys. 
Every child is taught the meaning of approbation and of 
contempt, and learns the meaning of candy and a hickory 
switch. But few children learn that disguise, artifice, 
deception, and falsehood have no value in “getting along” 
with the family. The child does learn that simulation does 
pay. If forced, it becomes adept in such behavior. Simula- 
tion becomes an intrinsic part of its adjustment repertoire. 

450 


I i a 


FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE NEWER PSYCHOLOGY 


The boss, the bully, the tease, the flirt, as well as the exhibi- 
tionist, sadist, and masochist, are also specialized products 
of vicious home or early school training. 

The instinct of self-preservation may find a perverted 
outlet in the impulse to be cruel to others. If continued, it 
makes for sadism: frightfulness, atrocities, prize-fights, 
cruelty for the sheer love of being cruel, including cruelty 
to one’s own children. 

The sex-complex is complex in man and in all species 
of animals with sexual reproduction. In human society it 
has become increasingly complex. It is so individualized 
that there are as many kinds of sex behavior as there are 
individuals. So many things in life are “loved” that senti- 
mentality is more common than sensuality. The inherent 
emotional drive to seek and love a mate goes out to dogs and 
sunsets, and bathes with tears the belongings of the late 
beloved. : 

These are habits, types of behavior; they vary with age 
and clime. These habits function in individuals. The sex 
behavior of any individual is only to be understood in the 
light of the manner in which the individual learned to 
respond to the two-sex world in which he or she grew up. 

To say that man is driven by sex is to say that man is a 
mammal, or that human reproduction is sexual. To say that 
a repressed libido is also a drive but hides in the Uncon- 
scious—to pop out in a bad dream or a psychosis—is the 
mystic’s way of saying that life learns, and that reflex arcs 
and salivary and other glands can be and are conditioned. 
To say—with Freud and Jung—that the mythology and 
symbolism of human culture have their roots in the 
Unconscious, is to make a magician’s cave where by psycho- 
analysis one can discover anything one puts into it. 

“Libido”” sounds more potent than love; “Unconscious” 
more mysterious than behavior. That is why Libido was 
so popular; why so many started to juggle with Unconscious. 

| 451 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


LO 


This is the age of honest skepticism and the dawn of 
enlightenment; even as it is of credulity—spawn of ignorance 
and blind faith. But no age has been so capitalized and 
exploited by fake science as are these States to-day. Fake 
healers, dozens of kinds, hundreds of practitioners; thousands 
of suckers. A sucker is a fish that bites at any bait. The 
healers do not even have to bait their hook. The larger the 
hook, the keener they bite. 

Develop your memory! Develop will-power! Learn how 
to be successful! Improve yourself! Learn to read char- 
acter! Personality experts! Psycho-analysts! Intelligence- 
testers! Psychics! Even “Psychologists,” on the Board 
Walk at Atlantic City! 

Body cures. Mind cures. Pills and pamphlets. The body 
that runs forty years on bad fuel is not to bé cured by 
charms—whether in sugar-coated pills, elixirs, gland 
extracts, massage, mud baths, mineral waters, or electric 
batteries. Nor can the “mind” be Tce ues “ ten lessons 
at $1 or 9100 a lesson; nor by reading a “set” of books 
or a year’s snlagaraaniari to some fake “payee ; 
magazine. 

Psychology is not magic, nor spiritualism, nor phrenology; 
nor the science of the soul, consciousness, unconsciousness, 
mind, or complexes. It is trying to be the science of human 
behavior. It does deal with the reactions human beings make 
to adjust themselves to change. 

Is your own “mind,” “will,” “personality,” or ‘chara thers 
a collection of facts that you can analyze and count as you 
can your fingers or the hairs on your hand or the buttons 
on your coat? Do you mean anything to yourself apart 
from your past experience? LKvery year of your life you 
have built something into you—taken on new experience, 
dropped out old ways of reacting to square with the new 

452 


OE a ee ee ee ee 


ee ae ee 


ee Se 





FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE NEWER PSYCHOLOGY 


experience. Every reaction you make is conditioned by 
former reactions and affected by the given situation. 

We are going concerns, not hide and hair and flesh and 
bones and instincts and faculties. Since birth, we are play- 
ing upon and are being played upon by our environment. 
The sum total of our personality—or “mind” or anything you 
choose to call it—does not stay put. We cannot deposit it, 
as we do money in a bank; nor sow it, as we sow wild oats 
or tame wheat—and return later to gather the harvest or 
burn the tares. Our personality does not stay put because 
situations change endlessly. Personality without reference 
to situation is as meaningless as a horse race with the horses 
tied to their stalls. 

Babe Ruth goes to the diamond and fans the air; Caruso 
gives a performance he is ashamed of. Why do “stars” and 
“champions” rise to heights of genius and at other times 
drop into mediocrity? Do they know? Do you? Can you 
predict what your game of tennis or golf will be to-morrow? 
Or whether you will sell a certain party certain bonds or 
insurance? You may have your selling campaign mapped’ 
out: can you predict its success? The “certain party” may 
have become quite a different party overnight. 

In estimating both our own and others’ personality, we 
have to reckon with emotions, instincts, memory, habits, 
sensations, age, experience, etc. These are variable 
factors. I am older to-day than I was yesterday; so much 
may have happened to me that I may not be the same person. 
Parents often suddenly realize that they do not know their 
own children. 

Wherever our “mind” goes when we die, it certainly goes 
with us while we live. I can read your mind “like a book” 
only if I have all the pages: and for each individual there 
are millions. I can test your capacity, or your intelligence, 
or your will, only as I can pick a winner at the horse race. | 
know at the end of the race. 

You can sell goods: you prove it by references. You may 

453 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


fail utterly to sell my cigarettes or my talcum powder. Your 
intelligence may be A.B. with Highest Honors: you may 
vote like a moron, fail as husband and father, mow the 
flowers instead of the lawn, and prove a dead loss on a 
camping-out party. ‘As for will: it is as “free” as air. And 
much more difficult to catch. I can develop as much will by 
lessons on will-power as I can develop water-power at Muscle 
Shoals by reading Couéism in a newspaper. 

You and I do not, cannot, see the same things. We do 
not see from the same point in space or time. Our eyes are 
not the same. We see only what we think we see. Your 
experience is your experience; mine is mine. We learn by 
experience. Our capacity to learn is the measure of our 
intelligence. Intelligence as so many yards of this and so 
many pounds of that at so much per, may qualify a lad for 


clerk in a notion shop, but furnishes no measure of the lad’s 


behavior outside that shop; or within, in case of fire, hold- 
up, or fainting fit of a lady customer. 

Sensations. Special sense organs: eyes, ears, nose, etc. 
I have my nose, you have yours: Limburger cheese—same 
sensation? I have ears, you have ears: a baby cries—same 
sensation? I have eyes, you have eyes: a woman smiles— 
same sensation? 

What is a stimulus? Cheese? Not after I have smelled 
it for an hour. Remove it: now it is a stimulus. A crying 
baby? If it cries for an hour it is a great stimulus. If it 
is yours I could murder it; if it is mine I telephone the 
doctor. We read the same column in a newspaper: as a 
result I buy S O S, you sell SOS. Another column may 
send me to sleep, send you to Europe. 

Stimulus is change. Throughout life, any and every 
change in environment excites us if our experience—and we 
inherit much—teaches us that we should make response. 

Our psychology is human, but our behavior is individual; 
for each of us, the aggregate of inherent capacities and 
experiences. 

454 





FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE NEWER PSYCHOLOGY 


One can read one’s own mind—in the light of past expe- 
rience; predict one’s own accomplishments—in the light of 
past achievements; and develop one’s own will—by prac- 
tising instead of preaching. 

Psychic power? I know what power is; I know what 
psyche is; I also know that knowledge may be power. But 
I can discover only one way to get knowledge into my head: 
through my sense perceptions. And only one way to get 
any power out of that knowledge: by inference, by reason. 
When my inference is bad, my reasoning is faulty; I have 
only my pains for my trouble—my power-plant ground me 
no grist. When I want magic power, I go see Houdini. 


Il 


All processes of thought function through reflex arcs which 
become conditioned, especially in childhood, and which tend 
to become habits. We learn to think logically just as we 
learn to speak correctly or to behave decently. I may think 
well, I may shave well—who shall say? My way of shaving 
and my way of thinking are my ways: the ways I have 
learned; they are my methods of response to certain stimuli 
in certain situations. I may change both to-morrow; some 
one is always inventing new ways of adjustment, new ways 
to excite human protoplasm to change its shaving soap. 

New thought also. Why not? We have new foods, new 
scandals, new songs, new elements, new diseases, new 
razors, new glands, new logic. New things to think about. 
The new grows out of the old—as corn grew out of wild 
grass, or as a submarine grew out of endless discarded 
models, or as chemistry grew out of alchemy, or as a poem 
grows out of tryings-out of word combinations. Trial and 
error. 

The point is that there is no thought without muscular or 
glandular activity; this is true whether the stomach thinks 
hunger, the dreamer thinks air-castles, the prisoner thinks 

455 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


freedom, or the maiden thinks of her lover. Thinking is a 
bodily act, as is coughing or scratching one’s head. During 
thinking energy is consumed, mechanism is involved; and, 
as a rule, the whole body is interested and is listening in. 

Can we listen in, can we read thought as we can test blood? 
Only when we can see it: as poem, as picture, on the golf 
links, behind the counter, at the ballot box. By works. Overt 
and explicit action. Money talks also. 

But suppose no money is forthcoming, how can we know 
what he thinks about it? Overt explicit behavior is easily 
enough detected and is often of less consequence than the 
implicit response. I ask you to lend me five dollars. You 
hand it over. That is an explicit act. But your implicit 
reaction may be of far greater consequence to me: you may 
think me a cheap skate and decide to cut me from your list. 
As you give no sign of such resolve, I cannot know that my 
“Lend me...” has cost so much. 

Of course, if you have looked it or muttered it in thought, 
I may be able to read your face or your lips. I may even 
suspect, with no overt sign on your part, that my request has 
moved you to more than is involved in handing over the 
bill. I question you; you deny that there is anything the 
matter with you. 

As we all do at times. As the run-in suspect does. His 
face is a perfect mask for innocence. His self-possession is 
complete. He is wrongly suspected! THe is innocent! The 
“third-degree” often breaks the mask and upsets the self- 
possession. More often the third-degree fails or is not 
available. 

Many methods have been tried out to read minds that 
would not be read, to detect an implicit response where the 
overt side had only been suspected. All these methods go 
on the justifiable assumption that what the individual does 
registers in the individual dynamic mechanism. Apply the 
proper test: the mechanism will yield its secret. 

An extreme case will illustrate the methods. Suppose I 

456 


pg ee. a 


FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE NEWER PSYCHOLOGY 


return unexpectedly to my store some night, to discover my 
partner in some questionable act. We quarrel. And I kill 
him. Then cut his body up and dispose of it in the furnace— 
an extraordinarily difficult thing to do, but just suppose that 
I succeed. 

The anger which prompts murder is an emotional impulse. 
There will be occasions and situations in which I shall have 
to be a man of iron to keep my emotions from betraying 
me. Charged with the crime, they might lead to changes 
in my respiration and vasomotor organization; even to 
increased sugar in my blood and urine. 

Or in my reactions to words. Woodworth has devised an 
emotional questionary to serve to detect implicit behavior. 
There are two types of word reactions: the free; the con- 
tinuous. In the free, words are fired at the subject one at a 
time. He is to reply with the first word that pops into his 
head suggested by the word used: bull—moose; rat—trap; 
pen—ink; teapot—dome; etc. Then comes a word which 
brings no response from me, or I am unusually long in 
reacting to it, or too quick. Or, if I am a girl suspected of 
being in love, I giggle, blush, or drop my eyes. 

The continuous type throws all the work on the subject 
investigated. Only one word is shot at him: he is to reply 
to his own replies. One word will suggest another; until 
the subject stops—blocked, as it were. Then a new word 
is given to start the subject off again. And again he seems 
to run out of words, is blocked. Do the lines converge? Do 
I always stop short of “murder,” or “furnace,” or chopping 
up a human body? Is my free association of words shorn 
of its freedom wherever and whenever I approach a word 
which suggests the emotion or the deed I am trying to 
conceal? 

Dreams also may yield valuable clues to the nature of 
personal stress and general emotional life. Also postures, 
attitudes, over and under reactions, poor adjustments, slips of 
word or pen, fumbling over names. But clues only. More 

457 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


often the “‘tests’’ fail completely—though they may lead to 
confession. 

Conscience does make cowards of us all and habit keeps 
us straight or crooked; fear of consequences makes us cover 
our tracks, 

“Reading the mind” is a figure of speech. The cashier of 
the First National may be a good reader of counterfeit 
money. I dump a bag of cowrie shells on his desk. Cowrie 
shells are money in some parts of the world. Some of my 
cowries are counterfeit. Can he read them? 


12 


The great by-product.of our participation in the World 
War was the startling discovery that ““America is a nation of 
morons!” Moron means dull or stupid, and is technically 
applied to children with permanently arrested mental devel- 
opment. Defective mentality due to congenital deficiency 
is ‘“‘amentia”; if due to deterioration, “dementia.” Con- 
genital imbecility is generally accompanied by a thin and 
poorly organized brain cortex. 

Nearly two million American adults were tested by the 
army as to their intelligence. The average was that of a 
normal school child of twelve. As the test sampled the 
nation, the cry went up, “Nation of morons!’ And much 
bunk was and is talked and written. | 

What is intelligence? “Ability to learn or to profit by past 
experience?’ All right. The hog is an intelligent animal; 
rattlesnake also; likewise hookworm and clam. “‘Civiliza- 
tion’s” intelligence, measured by the amount it has profited 
by past experience makes a poor showing; it goes right on 
putting its troubles upon the Lord instead of upon itself. 
Voters make the poorest showing of all: they put their trou- 
bles upon the “government.” 

The army had to find out whether a man could react to 
orders and learn to use a musket; if not, he was not intelli- 

458 





FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE NEWER PSYCHOLOGY 


gent enough to shoot or fit to be shot at. If, on the other 
hand, he knew the chemistry of explosives, he was too intelli- 
gent to be shot at and was put to work in an ammunition 
laboratory. The army had to make tests. It used certain 
lists of questions. 

I give you a list of questions. You may flunk completely. 
Have I tested your intelligence? Only to the extent of that 
particular list. Even then I have tested nothing of your 
capacity to learn or to profit by past experience. 

I have a bottle of liquid before me. I ask that bottle 
certain questions: Are you indican, creatine, glucose, or 
uric acid; have you any phosphates, calcium, or iron, in you? 
To each the bottle replies “No.” Very well, then, I cannot 
use you; your mother did not bring you up to be a soldier. 
But do I know from that test what that liquid is, or what it 
will do if I drop a hair or a lighted match in it? Or what 
it will do to me if I drink it? That bottle might be aqua 
vite itself, for anything I know to the contrary. I did not 
test it for aqua vite, only for urine. 

There are idiots, imbeciles, morons, all degrees of feeble- 
minded. Grade A feeble mind passes into the low grade of 
a mind that is not feeble; and so on up through the grades 
to genius. But there may be two reasons why I cannot talk 
Chinese: never tried to learn it; could not learn it. 

The deviltry of intelligence tests is the cold assumption 
that there is something missing in the headpiece of the boy 
of twelve who fails to make the grade, or that the adult of 
thirty with a twelve-year-old grade could not have qualified 
for college. 

A Zulu “cannot count above four’! Awful! What a 
moron! He owns a hundred head of cattle. Steal one. He 
knows it is gone: he has a name for every beast he owns. 
I am “good at figures.” With slate and pencil I can tell you 
how many minutes there are in a year. A Chinaman will 
reach the answer in less time and more certainly by playing 

459 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


with some buttons on some wires. An infant prodigy will 
do it in his head—right off—just like that. 

We start with suppositions in judging character, intelli- 
gence, personality. We must, of course. But as long as 
we are at the mercy of our convictions, we fail to realize 
that the boy of twelve does not make the grade not because he 
cannot but usually because that grade does not appeal to 
him. We have our own grades. The school, on the other 
hand, has its own. Instead of attempting to find out what 
grade I can make, it throws me out for not coming up to its 
standard. The average man meekly accepts the verdict 
incompetent, and is counted with the morons. 

Every individual at any given age has actual and potential 
assets and liabilities. He is either adjusted to his environ- 
ment and has the equipment for readjustment when the 
environment changes, or he is not and has not. He may not 
be a sissy to-day; would he be a sissy under any situation? 
He bites his nails, spits aimlessly, fumbles his nose, flies 
into a rage, collects shells, is upset by a worm, shies at girls, 
cheats at marbles, is always tardy: will he carry these habits, 
bents, hobbies, and emotional attachments and antagonisms 
to school—and out into life? ! 

Many a teacher’s time and patience spent trying to make 
the boy or girl learn could be better spent trying to find out 
what the boy or girl has a will to learn. Will being a human 
engine that goes best with certain fuel and in certain direc- 
tions. ‘‘Music lessons” have spoiled many a cook and 
“modern languages” many a farmer. 

If America is a nation of morons, then that is the answer 
to the attractiveness of the intellectual feast our educational 
system spreads; it is not a test of the American’s ability 
to learn. 

We are cars of many makes, types, styles, gears, and motor- 
capacity. Some are racers and some are trucks; some are 
no good on dirt roads and some are tractors and can climb 
mountains; some are one-seaters and some are buses; some 

460 








FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE NEWER PSYCHOLOGY 


can pull only themselves, others the whole family; some use 
a pint a mile and some a barrel. 

And as any car can be wrecked as it leaves the factory, 
so also by careful and scientific handling every car is good 
for its capacity. 

But we are more than machines; we make ourselves as 
we go. 

Is this also a measure of intelligence? 

What we make ourselves into depends on many factors. 
But one consideration should not be overlooked: there is no 
absolute in the measure of intelligence, only standards— 
yours, mine, this community’s, that society’s, etc. These 
standards vary and keep varying with time and place. 
Christopher Columbus could not qualify for a water-tender’s 
rating in the navy of Alfonso XIII. Of the world’s hundred 
geniuses perhaps five could pass any of the contraptions now 
in vogue to measure intelligence. Of this same hundred 
few, if any, were rated “Intelligence Al” by their con- 
temporaries. In fact, some of them were killed by their 
contemporaries for lack of intelligence. Was that a measure 
of the intelligence of their contemporaries? 


13 


During the month of August, 1914, a great nation lost its 
character but gained a reputation. 

Character seems to be an essence, a spirit, a core, a stuff, 
that defies analysis: like Consciousness or Unconscious Mind. 
“If I could only get at his ‘true character,’ we say, as 
though it were something quite beyond range of investigation. 
Or at least beyond anyone but a psycho-analyst: he might 
be able to “draw it out.” 

What do we do with a bottle that “looks like gin but may 
be poison”? Try it, or have a friend try it, or send it toa 
chemical laboratory. Are there laboratories where character 
may be analyzed? There are: palmists, phrenologists, hand- 

461 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


writing experts, Freudists, mind-readers, clairvoyants, 
Swamis, mystics, and charlatans—ignorant and honest or 
wise and dishonest. They all “read” character. 

While they are in the inner shrine with some one’s “true 
character” or “inner self,” let us not forget that human beings 
do not come like buttons from a mold but in individual 
packages. There is probably a prize in every package, if we 
only looked for it or knew how to find it. These packages 
come with a limited repertoire of habits, an unlimited amount 
of emotion, and an enormous capacity to learn. Further, 
they are keen to learn: their very bodies itch for action— 
they could not have peopled the earth and enslaved nature 
otherwise. Further, these little packages, in the natural 
process of becoming untied and budding like a rose or a 
sunflower as is their bent, become more and more tied up. 
With the result that by the time one is old enough to vote— 
whether it has learned what the ballot means or not—it be- 
longs to mother’s church and father’s party, and wears the 
clothes, thinks the thoughts, and swears by the flag the family 
and the community have wished on it. 

In short, its “character” may be nil, its reputation fine. 
But it is a person and is so recognized by law. It has a per- 
sonality. It is a going concern. Where and how fast and 
how long it goes, and when it will throw a fit or jump the 
track or explode, depend... Fill in the details yourself. 

We do, every day: Shall I marry her? Does he love 
me? Shall we invite them? Shall I accept his invitation? 
Shall we let her go to the dance with him? Dare I make the 
venture? Is he fit for our son to play with? Is his note 
good? Shall I employ him? Is she a good cook? Is he 
an honest chauffeur? Would you, if you were I? 

How do we answer these questions? Call in a palmist? 
Some do, or there would be no palmists. But most of us 
answer them as we answer other questions, such as: Wonder 
if I dare eat that pie? Is it a real ruby? Is this a good 
lipstick? Shall I buy Q. E. D. or sell P. D. Q.? Shall we 

462 





FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE NEWER PSYCHOLOGY 


send Willie to Brown or to Green? Is this road safe? Shall 
we go to the movies or to church? Is the beer all gone? 
Shall we quit now or play till morning? Is this suit good 
enough? Shall I endow a charity now or steal another 
million? 

We make mistakes. With original sin loose in the world, 
we must. We make mistakes in persons and things. “She 
is not what I thought she was”: which is correct enough, for 
having met you she is to that extent different. “That is not 
what I thought I bought”: true again; but it is what you 
were sold. 

We learn by our experience. And some learn fast and 
with profit, and others learn as little as possible. It all 
depends. 

But if we were “good” children and learned to jump at 
father’s orders, and to “respect” his authoritative manner and 
commanding ways, and learned to smile and swallow “like 
a good little man” the nasty medicine the doctor leaves for 
poor little sick boys, we are likely later to listen with open 
mouth to the man who pounds the platform or the pulpit or 
fills the room with his magnetic personality! But if father 
was a little runt without voice or influence in family affairs, 
we are likely to overlook the personality in a shrimp. 

A “pleasing,” “thrilling,” “absorbing” personality is one 
we like to touch. Men shake their hands. Women kiss 
them. When “I instinctively like that person,” the instinct 
that is talking is an unanalyzed sexual or emotional slant 
based on early habits of love. A “lovable” personality 
within the same sex is possible because sharp leanings toward 
the other sex were not formed at the time sex matured. 
Co-education is sanitary education. 

We jump at our personality conclusions. We know he 
cannot be this and she cannot be that. What we really know 
is that some personalities appeal to us, others do not. We 
can rarely give the real reason for our spontaneous judg- 

463 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


ments. Personalities are rather more complex than apples — 


or motor cars. 

The most “erect carriage” may be the greatest social 
scoundrel unhung. The “intelligent brow” may be housed 
under a dunce’s cap. The “‘squarest chin” may be a weak 
sister and the most henpecked man in town. The “firm 
mouth” may hide a flabby body and a soft head. 

Some things do show through: elation, despondency, ete. 
But the rosiest cheeked apple may have a wormy heart. A 
woman with a homely face covers it with hat and veil or 
tresses, and sells herself on her form. 

Pick fifty men at random from Fifth Avenue. Take them 


to the Tombs, shave their heads and photograph them. Mix 


the photographs in with those of fifty inmates. Call in your 
mind-readers and character experts. How many will they 
pick out? As many as the law of chance allows them. Now 
take the fifty inmates, dress them in the hair and clothes of 
the new arrivals, and drop them along Fifth Avenue. Call 
in your character experts. If they can pick these fifty 
“toughs” off Fifth Avenue, they should report to the Chief 
of Police of New York or the Attorney-General of the United 
States. Jobs await such men. 

People who read character from hands like to hold hands; 
and vice versa. If they pay to have their hands held they 
do not lose their personality, only their money. 

John Stuart Mill speaks of an event which took place on 
Calvary: “The man who left on the memory of those who 
witnessed his life and conversation such an impression of his 
moral grandeur that eighteen subsequent centuries have done 
homage to him as the Almighty in person, was ignominiously 
put to death. As what? As a blasphemer!” 


14 
Life is easily destroyed, but the matter of life is inde- 


structible. Life easily tires, but the energy of life is not lost. 
464, 





eee 


FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE NEWER PSYCHOLOGY 


Life is dynamic. When struck—as by blow of slipper or by 
a chuck under the chin—a chemical reaction takes place; 
that reaction alters its nature. It is now something else. The 
change may be slight; it may be so great that its very dynamic 
nature is altered—the change endures for life. 

Life is impelled to action because it is a reacting mecha- 
nism: certain stimuli impel it to action. What life does de- 
pends upon what life is; and that, in turn, depends upon what 
life does. The life that climbed up to man never ceased to 
recreate itself on higher levels. The oftener it reacts, the 
greater the ease of action; practice makes perfect. But life 
itself is not moved by perfection; with too much practice 
it grows fatigued. Had life been content with mere per- 
fection, it would have stopped with bacteria and alge. It 
essayed more difficult réles and by greatly daring became 
man. It could not have built up a nature so imperious for 
power or so keen for experience had it been content to say: I 
desire nothing more; I am perfect. | 

A perfect man is as finished a product of Nature as a 
bacterium and may be fit for Nirvana, but not to rule or to 
lead men. For men are of the stock that moved up out of the 
slime and set no limit to their desires. They insist on action 
because action is the nature of their inheritance. But they 
must have new stimuli or they fall asleep with ennui. 

We begin our life with a semifluid body of twenty-odd 
chemical elements which surrender their original nature in 
becoming welded into a compact organic system. This body 
builds itself up into a vastly complex machine of billions of 
individual bodies, each retaining something of its original 
nature, each surrendering something of its original nature 
that we may function as one individual being. The energy 
which drives this machine is chemical, the impulse which 
drives the machine to secure this energy is inherent in the 
living protoplasm of our body. 

Chemical-reactions in a chemical body. Of some reactions 
we are conscious, of most of them we are not conscious. 

465 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


But the living mind and the living body are inseparable and 
together make up the individual. We never know what is in 
our “mind,” for the mind is the living body which because of 
its nature must react to every vital change in its environment. 
We can recall to memory only a few of these reactions: those 
burned in. We cannot recall countless memories; we have 
no machinery or organs for forgetting. Nevertheless, they 
have left their mark; each reaction alters the protoplasm 
for further reactions; it is never again the same. As the 
universe itself is not made, but is continually being made, so 
with man. | 

This view of universe and man is repugnant to many; it 
disturbs the serenity of their belief in the Absolute and 
Eternal and the simplicity of their thought that earth and man 
were created, as a magician conjures goldfish out of nothing 
and rabbits out of an empty hat. 

Man’s chief impulse at each moment of his existence is for 
life: self-preservation. At certain moments food-hunger dom- 
inates the self-preservation impulse, at other moments sex- 
hunger dominates. But because of his capacity to supplement 
his motor mechanism with tools, weapons, and appliances, 
he was able to give his biologic impulses ever-changing out- 
lets. He also developed language into a definite means of 
communication, and thereby further extended the range of 
possible responses to living impulses. Thus, on his repertoire 
of animal adjustments to vital conditions he superimposed 
a repertoire of human adjustments. The rise, development, 
spread, and decay of these purely human adjustments make 
up the story of the history of human culture. 

The culture of any people, tribe, race, or nation at any 
given time is an historical problem. Memphis, Troy, and 
Carthage, of the Old World or the New, are riddles apart 
from their setting, apart from the historic factors which 
conditioned their development. The lives of Buddha, Con- 
fucius, Socrates, Mohammed, Tamerlane, Elizabeth, Napo- 

466 








FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE NEWER PSYCHOLOGY 


leon, Washington, and Frank Smith, are also riddles without 
their setting. 

Each age carried its loaded situation to which human beings 
responded in obedience to the impulse to live. Every age had 
its modes, norms, habits, opinions, manners, customs, taboos, 
and its written and unwritten codes of behavior. Mohammed 
born on Beacon Street would have gone to Harvard and been 
a Unitarian. 

Every age thought itself wise and prattled of “progress”; 
and lagged from one to one hundred decades behind its own 
wisdom. Our own national habits and social, educational, 
legal, and governmental institutions jog along in ruts worn 
smooth by our forefathers. There is not a city in the United 
States organized as a community for the purposes of living, 
almost no individual that practices what he preaches or puts 
to useful purpose a tenth part of his brains. 

A hand fitted by nature to swing from limbs and catch fleas 
learns in five years to drive a nail and in fifteen years to 
drive a car it took culture 100,000 years to make. One 
wonders that culture required so many years to produce the 
car; but one is amazed that so many children can learn to 
drive a car in such short time. In other words, our civiliza- 
tion as the “product of all the ages” loses much of its glamour 
when viewed against the background of what an ordinary boy 
or girl can learn in twoscore years. 

Tokyo, Peking, Delhi, Cairo, Rome, London, New York, » 
Main Street: random sample worlds. Into these life comes 
in small packages called babies, fundamentally all alike, all 
human, all blood-kin, all of one species. They have the same 
general adjustment mechanism in the same excitable proto- 
plasm, with the same instinct for life and the same emotional- 
drive equipment. And all have parents to tide them over the 
infantile period until such time as their motor mechanism will 
enable them to seek their own food, water, and shelter, and 
in general make their own adjustments, including picking a 


mate. 
467 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


These same babies one, five, twenty, fifty years later show 
differences more than skin deep, differences burned into the 
very protoplasm of their bodies. Which means: their habits 
are different, their thoughts are different. They doff their 
hats to different gods and play the game of life in different 
ways and for different stakes. 

Contents of their mind? We can only answer that as we 
know the conditioning of their mind: what they jump at and 
why. Always remembering that individual variation sets a 
limit to our jumping mechanism; also that we know little of 
that limit because it is restricted by fears and hemmed in by 
taboos. 

Into each home the baby comes as a loaded stimulus. It 


may be hailed as the watcher greets the dawn; or with, } 


‘“‘Well, here it is’; or as another mouth to feed. Its arrival 
is a complex of stimuli. Out of these the baby is often made 
or broken the day it is born—a chance that must be taken 
these days as the price of the opportunity to become civilized. 

Most of them do. Some never become adjusted. They die, 
as Socrates, Savonarola, Lavoisier; or they are fed to the 
lions by Nero, disappear on Saint Bartholomew’s Day, or 
work in a factory. They borrow, beg, or steal. There are as 
many ways and degrees of unadjustment as there are of ad- 
justment, all graduated to the ways and degrees to which 
adjustment is demanded. 

In short, there is no knowing man without knowing men. 
“Everybody’s doing it” and “‘People don’t do such things” 
are collective reactions biologically useful in herds and early 
human society, but they persist in countless forms to-day and 
extend their influence to such unimportant biologic factors in 
modern life as ruffles on skirts and creases in trousers. 
“Everybody is’ and “People don’t” become potent factors in 
modifying the environment to which individuals are con- 
ditioned to respond. 

Almost before the youngster has learned to respond to the 
facts of life, he is compelled to learn adjustment to th 

468 | 





ht. 
a 
‘ 
i 
: 
P 
4 
’ 


~~ 





FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE NEWER PSYCHOLOGY 


fancies of life. Human behavior as adjustment is meaningless 
without understanding the power of social environment to en- 
force its limited responses upon the newcomers. Society does 
not easily change its mind, because to change is to acknowl- 
edge defeat; it hates to run. Its mind being its entire body 
and tied up with emotion, it vents its hate on “Don’ts” and 
much of its energy in enforcing obedience. 

But there is almost no limit to the pressure that a normal 
individual can stand if the pressure is applied gradually; 
we get calloused: to odors, sights, sounds, and bondage of 
trappings, and the harness by which we draw our burdens. 
And well for us that we can become accustomed to the burdens 
of things, people, and situations that we must bear. But man 
is not by nature a beast of burden or fitted by nature to keep 
his nose to a grindstone. And the man so yoked or chained 
is one more human being lost for activities that might be 
human. 

As one recalls some of the monstrous situations under 
which human beings have lived and live their lives, one 
marvels at man’s meekness and complacency. It can only be 
explained by that quality of flesh to become calloused to 
situations that if faced suddenly would provoke blisters and 
revolt. 

Man’s inheritance is all right and is his only inherently 
valuable asset. It is human behavior—individual, com- 
munal, national—that can be changed. But not by cut-and- 
dried programs of social reform; nor by reformers, codes, 
ideals, or by our present “system” of education. Life itself 
is not systematized or standardized: it wants to live, it wants 
to enjoy life. It has a pain sense; it responds to love; above 
all, it can learn. We start with that equipment. Herein lies 
the significance of the new conception of human behavior; the 
importance of the task that confronts the new psychology. 

Organized society is—or should be—interested in socially 
serviceable behavior. Its problem is to control behavior for 
social ends and at the same time give the individual free- 

469 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


dom to express and develop his innate capacities for normal 
behavior. This cannot be brought about by chance; there will 
be delinquents, abnormals, subnormals, as long as breeding 
grounds for such are regarded as normal by-products of 
social organization. The entire substratum of misfits will 
disappear only when the environment is so changed that 
misfits do not form part of its normal output. 

Rational conduct isa dream. But conduct freed of sordid- 
ness, of squalor, of haunting fears, of ungoverned tempers, 
should be the possible fate of every normal child. We can 
at least make this a better world for children to be born into, 
and so alter their environment that they need not learn to 
lie, steal, murder, or commit rape or bigamy, to succeed. 

The seemingly infinitely large universe is made up of the © 
seemingly infinitely small units of electrons. The universe — 
is what it is because of the nature of their behavior under 
the drive of energy. That same energy drives us. The units 
of our social universe are human individuals; it can be 
molded only as the individuals themselves are molded. Liv- 
ing beings are not elements, but reaction systems: their be- 
havior can be molded. Ours is already set; but it is not 
necessary that we condition our children to the mold in which 
we hardened. 

In the whole history of human thought there has been voiced 
only one rule of conduct of the slightest value as a standard 
for human behavior. It is applicable to individuals, families, 
communities, cities, states and nations: 

“As ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them 
likewise.” 

But note that you and I as individuals can never get a start 
on putting the Golden Rule into practice until we have set our 
own house in order. When we strip our unethical and in- 
fantile hang-overs of behavior of their veneer of rationaliza- 
tion we are likely to be astounded, as Watson points out, at 
our “susceptibility to flattery, weakness, inadequacy, or lack 
of knowledge, jealousy, fear of rivals, fear of being made 

470 








FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE NEWER PSYCHOLOGY 


the scapegoat,” and proneness to hurl criticism upon others 
to escape it ourselves. The first step in setting our house in 
order is to remove the beam from our own eyes—perhaps the 
hardest task man ever set himself, certainly a task that can be 
achieved only by the brave. 

When human society starts to practice the Golden Rule, it 
will lay a foundation for civilization which no flood of pas- 
sion can shake. Any other conditioning of our inherent 
nature leaves us as we are—with an animal nature modified 
only by man-made devices to satisfy living impulses as old as 
life itself. Man is the product of evolution; humanity must 
be the goal of human endeavor. 


15 


Probably no two are of the same opinion as to.what con- 
stitutes socially useful behavior. But there can be no doubt 
that many do not get out of life what life might be expected 
to yield, considering the length of time it has been on the 
job, and that many do not give to society the service society 
might expect to receive, considering the energy it expends on 
educational and social endowments. Why this is so is an 
enormously difficult and vastly complicated problem. Is it 
because society solves living with the latest mechanical con- 
traptions and solves life with old rules? At any rate, it 
knows next to nothing about life, but does have a large collec- 
tion of gadgets for living. As a consequence, we are at the 
mercy, and not in command, of the tools of living. 

This is no plea for the “simple life’—or a remedy for 
anything. Goodness knows, we have enough prescriptions, 
and enough bandwagons and barkers inviting us to climb 
aboard. But have we a sound diagnosis of social ills and 
individual disabilities? Are our parents and teachers setting 
examples of rational and intellectual living, and are they 
getting into the rising generation such an outlook on life, such 
a conception of the possibilities of life, and such a compre- 

471 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


hension of the unlimited capacities for life, that the next gen. 


eration will inevitably live a broader, saner, sounder, and 
more intellectual life than we are living? 

And by intellectual I do not mean “high-brow” stuff. 1 
mean the kind of intelligence that distinguishes men from 
cats and cattle—what they think about, what occupies their 
gray matter. There is no inherent reason why the miner, 
plowman, and milkmaid should not be as intellectual as the 


poet, auditor, or school-teacher.. Coal, corn, and milk furnish _ 


us more energy than poems, balance sheets, and schools. If 
ignorance is bliss, all right. But this country proceeds on 
the theory that ignorance is a defect, that education will cure 
it, and that the opposite of ignorance is intelligence; and 
that compulsory education makes for intelligence. 


But does it? What has the boy or girl of intelligent be- i 


havior on leaving school? To say that they have a smattering 
of this and of that is to say what everybody knows and what 
has been said thousands of times: that they have added a 
few hundred words to their vocabulary, have memorized a 
few facts and formulae, have dissected a fishworm (possibly) 
and a flower, and have read several hundred pages of history 
and polite literature. That may be education, but it is not 
life; nor is it hitched to human lives or human society; nor 
is it intelligence. 

Good, honest, hard-headed character is a function of the 
home. If the proper seed is sown there and properly nour- 
ished for a few years, it will not be easy for that plant to 
be uprooted. But it is the business of the school so to engage 
youthful interests that youthful energies will flow into crea- 
tive channels. No school can really educate; but every 
school should nourish the enthusiasm of every normal child 
for learning, for exploring, for manipulating; should stimu- 
late the fountain of youthful curiosity and not plug it up with 
facts. Above all, it should not dam youth up—or down. 
Youth has the will, the energy, the impetus; give it raw meat 
and bones to chew on. Give it a place in the sun, keep it in 

472 





ee ee 


ys % 


aad’ Wi mere 


ee 





FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE NEWER PSYCHOLOGY 


touch with life, help it to get its feet on the ground and its 
wits ground to a razor edge. To go over the same old ground, 
to analyze the same old moss-covered problems, is dilettant- 
ism; it is not preparation for life. This is a new world; it 
demands new brains, and new people to handle the new prob- 
lems of life and of human society, quite as much as people 
trained in building bridges and motor cars or in selling lip- 
sticks and bonds. 

Socially useful behavior is not more prevalent because 
socially fashionable behavior has a better lobby. Good Form 
is in the saddle; it is ruthless, it is mighty, and it does prevail. 
It is not founded on intelligence, it requires no brains, it has 
no outlook, it is stupid and short-sighted, it incites to anarchy 
and chaos. Education to-day is its handmaid and its body- 
servant. As a propagator of unsocial behavior, the so-called 
Christian Church, with its endless squabbles over forms, 
creeds, and rituals, and its eternal betrayal of humanity, is 
not far behind. By Fashion I do not mean the or a Four 
Hundred; I mean those in power of money and of govern- 
ment; our bosses; the people who are trying to make us buy 
their wares, join their club, vote their ticket, think their 
thoughts, and help them kill or cripple their enemies. 

After all, what can be of less consequence to you than 
whether I believe in this or that kind of a God, Saviour, gov- 
ernment, society? What is of consequence to you, to society, 
and to me, is what I do. I may be a socialist, an agnostic, 
and incredulous of the Mosaic origin of woman from a man’s 
rib and of the parthenogenetic origin of the Christ and of 
several other things you believe in. What of it? Why should 
you try to convert me to your way of thinking? The fact that 
you hold a certain opinion or belief does not necessarily mean 
more than that you have inherited it from some simple-minded 
ancestor, and that in being handed down it has acquired 
sanctity—like a hair watch-chain. What is vitally more im- 
portant is that I live as an honest human being who acknowl- 
edges responsibilities and obligations, who plays the game 

473 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


like a thoroughbred, who does not whine and does not cheat, — 
and who believes that there is room in this world for many © 
creeds but for only one religion. 

The kind that was Lincoln’s. Does anyone know what 
Lincoln believed? The world knows what he did. He lived 
his religion, day by day. As I recall a famous conversa- 
tion started by an inquiring soul who wished to know how he 
might be saved, he was not told to tell his beads or burn 
candles or sing hymns or sign a pledge or subscribe his 
name in a book or even to be baptized; he was told to do 
something: to get in bed with humanity. 

Is education attempting to encourage creative thought, or 
merely trying to divert thinking into old channels and so 
stifle it entirely? Thinking on old lines is to continue in the 
same old way regardless of reason or intelligence. Thinking 
soundly is to wake up and ask questions; it is to make new 
creations possible. 

I went through one school and was halfway through another 
before I woke up and discovered that I was alive; that it is 
no sin to question anybody or anything; and that there are 
several problems yet unsolved! It was quite too long before 
I realized the difference between “That is so” and “That is 
necessarily so’’; quite too long before I realized that going 
to college did not necessarily mean anything in particular. 

Curricula change and lists of “electives” grow like weeds, 
but the human nature in the professors and in the pupils re- 
mains the same. The school merely demands that a certain 
amount of a specified number of courses be absorbed; the 
success of: a course is measured by the number that take it. 
The curriculum itself reads like a mail-order catalogue. No 
conceivable course is omitted, except one on life and how to 
get more out of it with less friction to others and less lost mo- 
tion to the liver. 

All this may sound like propaganda. It is. Propaganda 
for sanity; for enlightment; for brain work; for time to live 
and the acquisition of a few simple tools to live with; for 

474, 





FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE NEWER PSYCHOLOGY 


understanding; for such charity as will abolish the need for 
alms; for honesty in rulers and intelligence in legislation; 
for a stop-and-think-it-over week; for regard for human 
rights; for critical judgments; for dispassionate opinions; 
for hatred of shams, intolerance, falsehood, and deception; 
for riddance of quacks, mountebanks, impostors, charlatans, 
vermin, squalor, and ignorance; for a car for every family 
and a joy ride through life for everyone; for socially useful 
behavior. 

Everything that man has made, done, said, and thought has 
been built on the impulse to live, organic hunger for food and 
mate, fashioned, molded, and reinforced by the emotional 
drive in life. Every normal human being has that equip- 
ment at birth. It is in the very marrow of the child’s bones, 
in the protoplasm of its nerves. It is the foundation of every 
personality. It cannot be wiped out, crushed, or stifled; it 
can be warped, distorted, diseased, degraded. -It can be 
encouraged to grow, to expand, to blossom, to bear fruit. It 
may produce an inspiring leader who will show the way and 
be the way to bring a new order into the world of human 
affairs. Society may kill him. Never mind. Society will 
build a monument to him in admiration of his having dared 
to be a leader. The least we can do is to keep our hands off 
the courage of youth. 

Emotional drives are not new in man, or even in Primates. 
The newness, the uniqueness, are man’s responses. Rage 
and fear once led to fight or flight; they now supply the 
drives which may lead to drink, to burglary, to murder, to 
insanity, to suicide even. As Thomas points out, the day- 
dreamer may become a scientist, a swindler, or a liar; the 
adventurer, a vagabond, cowboy, missionary, geologist, or 
ethnologist; the killer may shoot big game with a rifle or 
with a camera; the sex-impulse may lead to a Don Juan, to 
a prostitute, to a love-lyric poet, or to a lover of home and 
family. 

475 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


The problem, then, is such a reorganization of society that 
socially useful behavior shall be at least as profitable and 
interesting as unsocial or criminal behavior. Opinions may 
differ as to the extent to which bootlegging, prize-fighting, and 
prostitution are unsocial, but there is no doubt about the 
profitableness of these professions—as compared, let us say, 
with farming, preaching, and teaching school. 

What is wrong with the picture? Each one, I repeat, will 
have his own opinion and his own remedy—and will be ready 
enough to express opinion and remedy, and back up both with 
hot argument, if necessary. But what will he do about it? 
Parents will continue to do business with unsocial or crimi- 
nal professions, and teachers will probably labor in vain 
for a living wage; but there is one thing both parents and 
teachers can do: give youth the opportunity to become con- 
scious of society, of human life, of humanity; encourage it 
to think, to speculate, to revalue, to weigh evidence, to be- 
come disgusted, to choose, to see through things, to see things 
and life objectively. Critical consciousness. 

How has “progress” been made in medicine, in chemistry, 
in physics, in engineering, in all the respects in which progress 
has been made? By doubts, by questionings, by testings of 
hypotheses, by solutions of problems, by critical activity in 
the human cortex. 

Man is a free moral agent and can be magnanimous and 
deal disinterestedly, humanity is a definite goal, social justice 
is desirable and possible, individual lives may be gloriously 
diversified, uniquely individualized, and yet socially useful; 
or, these are mere phrases, snares to catch gulls, soothing 
syrup for troubled souls. Here again, opinions will differ; 
but no one will pretend that society to-day is organized (as 
a living organism is organized) or that social relations are 
one whit more intelligently ordered than in the days of 
Pericles or of Julius Cesar. 

The problem, then, narrows down to this: children of 

: 476 








FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE NEWER PSYCHOLOGY 


nature and creatures of circumstance as we are, can we dis- 
cover what organic evolution is up to and can we help it on 
its way? 


16 


You and I and all living beings differ from dead things 
in one respect: we grow, and by one process; we incorporate 
inorganic and dead organic matter into our individual bodies. 
Our nature is such that we are impelled to do this. This gives 
us a clue to organic evolution. 

For, note: the matter which must be incorporated within 
our bodies is outside us; we must get it. During organic 
evolution, it was not life that evolved; it was the rate and the 
kind of life that was lived; faster, freer. 

The visible agencies finally evolved for the faster, freer 
life were: motor mechanism of bony levers worked by muscle 
engines; special analyzers or distance receptors; cerebral 
cortex; and vocal cords and voice mechanism. These agencies 
made for improved locomotion, more exact information, 
more space for storing information, and improved facilities 
for exchanging information. Accompanying these visible 
agencies or tools for a faster, freer life, there evolved special 
physico-chemical mechanisms for driving life—as though life 
had grown a firecracker under its tail, as it were. These 
agencies and the emotional-drive mechanisms man shares 
with other Primates and to a large extent with all mammals. 
Only, man’s motor mechanism moves on two feet instead of 
four; his hands are freed from the drudgery of footwork; 
and his cortex is so vast that he can measure stars and elec- 
trons, but not his own capacity for intelligent action. In fact, 
his potentialities are as far beyond our powers of vision as 
we of to-day were beyond the vision of our ancestor who in- 
vented fire by rubbing two sticks together. 

Are language and culture the inevitable consequences of 
man’s nature? Are they the goal of the faster, freer life 

A477 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


made possible by certain agencies and mechanisms? Is man 
himself the finished product of an evolution which continually 
created life on higher levels? The idea is worth manipulating. 

Consider the emotional drive. Where has it not carried 
man? To what heights and depths has it not driven him? The 
fiery passion for life, the haunting fear of the unknown! The 
ages-long persecutions, the massacres, the burnings, the tor- 
turings, the revilings, done in the name of God to prove that 
God is just! The hells that have been invented to scare 
children into loving a merciful God! How the heavenly choir 
must have wept—or laughed! 

Death is a common affair in nature; for millions of years 
man had been dying of old age or disease or killed in combat. 
But he suddenly becomes conscious of death! And within a 
few centuries he has raised a natural phenomenon to a vast 
and complicated rite, and expects the very stars to stand still 
while he breathes his last. The monuments to the dead, the 
worship of the dead, the prayers for the dead! Yes, and the 
communion with the dead! All this had to be, presumably; 
man had become that kind of an animal. 

It was inevitable that his curiosity should impel him to 
explore his world, to manipulate it, to play with it and experi- 
ment with it; that with hands he should tear down and build 
up, that with voice he should fashion speech and with words 
should remold the world to his heart’s desire. 

It was inevitable that upon his bisexual world he should 
erect a family hearth; it was not inevitable that he should 
invent this or that kind of household gods, or that upon that 
hearth he rear a harem or found an order of celibacy or 
vestal virgins. Or that he should worship his wife, or degrade 
her to a parasite; or that she should make a fool or a criminal 
of him. . 

It was inevitable that his love for life and fear of death 
should lead him to magic rites and groveling superstitions; 
it was not inevitable that his religion should be used as a 

478 





FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE NEWER PSYCHOLOGY 


cloak to hide his selfishness, justify his greed, and sanctify 
his lust for blood and gold. 

Culture, in short, was inevitable. Man was, man did. 
Our evidence of the causal relation of tides to moon rests on 
no more solid foundation. Once there were no Primates; 
Primates came. There was no man; man came—and with 
him came culture, little by little, slowly, painfully, gropingly, 
even reluctantly at times. But it came: words to talk with; 
gods to placate; rules and laws to break or obey; swirls of 
family life ever growing larger; tribal organization and 
states, torn asunder, being rebuilt, organizing and reorgan- 
izing; music, art, literature, classified knowledge, science, 
philosophy, moonshine; and all the countless material things 
made by hands, conceived by brains. 

Here it is, all about us: evidence that the drive behind life 
has lost none of its power; proof that, impelled by that 
drive, man can build as well as destroy; that in his nature is 
more of Vishnu the Creator than of Siva the Destroyer. 
And this human culture that is ours by inheritance and by 
the efforts of the generation now living, is real. It makes up 
the social and much of the physical environment into which 
children are to-day being born. They are the same children, 
they bring with them the same old organic needs and hungers. 
How will they fare? 

A.D. 2000 seems a long way off; it is no more remote than 
1850. My father, now living, was a young man in 1850; 
my grandson, now living, may expect to be alive in 2000. 
How free will the next generation be to work out its own sal- 
vation, to guide its life in the light of wisdom? Will life be 
more free seventy-five years hence than it is to-day? Are 
we more free than were our ancestors two thousand years 
ago? 

How free are we of to-day—from war, pestilence, earth- 
quake, volcano, fire, sickness, idiocy, imbecility, pauperism, 
crime, squalor, shipwreck, stupidity, ignorance, superstition, 

479 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


famine, disease; from accidents of mines, factories, railroads, 
automobiles, and airplanes; from harsh sounds, bad air, and 
foul odors; from scorn, malice, and intolerance; from vested 
interests and established opinion in church, school, and gov- 
ernmient in home, society, and nation; from clocks, time- 
tables, and calendars; from the decrees of fashion, the con- 
victions of the mob, the mandates of the politicians? In short, 
how free are we of the ox goad and the treadmill? We know 
that winter will come, and provide accordingly; our expecta- 
tion that there will be another harvest next year is that of the 
bees and the squirrels. More free to live than we were, more 
prepared to die; but in all respects more free? It is doubtful. 
It is less doubtful that we are not as free as we might be. 

Fast, yes: we live at an incredible speed. Experience is 
disseminated and things and beings are transported across 
lands and seas unknown a few centuries ago, and at a speed 
inconceivable to the pioneers of the Pony Express. We can- 
not yet travel as fast as sound-waves, but it is not incredible 
that a future generation will travel as fast as light-waves. 

In so far, then, as man has speeded living, and to the extent 
that he has freed human beings, he is fulfilling his destiny. 
But has he completed his mission? Has he made the most 
of his opportunities? Is he progressing, is he on the straight 
and shining rails, or is he in a maze, a blind alley, an appen- 
dix to a cecum which holds the threat of gangrene and 
destruction? There are criteria for life; is there a biologic 
criterion for progress? 

Note again that, while culture was inevitable because man 
is a nervous, excitable, unarmored, defenceless, selfish, self- 
centered, opinionated, inquisitive, bullying, cowardly, talk- 
ing, marrying animal, who requires shelter, food, and a mixed 
diet, and has a big head and quick wits and is handy with 
his hands, the particular bents culture took were no more 
inevitable than are the particular words I am now putting 
down on paper. If Buddha and Confucius, Moses and Plato, 

480 





4 
io 
‘a 
I 
* 


FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE NEWER PSYCHOLOGY 


Washington and Lincoln, were inevitable, then I can think of 
nothing less illuminating as a guide to human conduct than 
human history. If not inevitable, then they are priceless 
illustrations of man’s capacity to transcend a nature which is 
generally satisfied with a few simple reactions to a stimulating 
world to meet a few fundamental organic needs and hungers. 

Note, too, that history does not repeat itself. Why should 
it?) Who wants it to repeat? To the best of our knowledge, 
nothing on this planet repeats. While the elements and the 
energies change not at all, or imperceptibly, the forms matter 
takes and the work energy performs do change. The organic 
needs and hungers inhere; they drive man to-day, as yester- 
day, as in pre-Cambrian days, they drove his ancestors. 

Drove? How? By a stepping up, a raising of the potential 
of the power. As a result, the machine became more com- 
plicated but more highly integrated; its parts became larger 
but under better control; it was capable of more refined 
work, could vary its output, forecast the future, provide for 
unforeseen contingencies. This is creative evolution. It is 
real, it is tangible, its history can be read in the rock record, 
can be measured in the cortex of the brain, and can be seen 
in the fields of waving grain and in the flocks of sheep and 
the herds of cattle. It was in the direction of freedom. 

What is freedom? No two dictionaries define it alike. No 
two generations define it alike. No one generation agrees as 
to who shall be free. The framers of our Magna Charta of 
freedom went right on killing Indians and breeding slaves. 
We shall get little insight into freedom from the law courts; 
we must look deeper. Can we find a biologic concept for 
freedom? Is there a goal, as it were, to creative evolution? 

Our vision is so limited! We know so little of life! Who 
shall say? 

But we shall try. All the cats, dogs, rats, and guinea-pigs 
martyred in the name of science have died in vain, and all the 
laboratories built to serve science are illusions, if the net 
result is but a few human lives saved and no light thrown 

481 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


on what it is that is saved and whether it is worth saving. 
Life can save itself if given a fair chance. What is worth 
saving? What is the direction of creative evolution? What 
is it that has been thrown up by ages-long stirrings of the 
mud? What quality characterizes man as it does no other 
animal, his Primate ancestors as it does no other order of 
mammals; which distinguishes a fertilized human ovum from 
all other protoplasm; which furnishes us a key to human cul- 
ture, reduces our What-has-evolved to a lowest common de- 
nominator, and gives us a clue to the freedom that is the 
goal of creative evolution? The capacity to modify and delay 
reactions according to experience. That kind of behavior is 
called intelligent. 

Intelligence is vague; we must give it reality. It means 
to learn. But every animal learns—ameba, oyster, fish, 
groundhog. The squirrel stores nuts for a wintry day. The 
instinctive behavior of many animals is remarkable. But we 
can speak of the evolution of intelligent behavior. And that 
is no mere figure of speech. Nor is it without significance 
that with man, and with man only, we find human intelligence. 
Of all Primate infants, the human infant alone learns human 
behavior. 

Why? Because it has a larger learning equipment, more 
ways of obeying impulses, a greater capacity to modify im- 
pulses in the light of experience. 

Tap my patellar ligament, my foot kicks out; but only after 
a lapse of time. The interval was short, but time was re- 
quired for spinal cord to deliver the impulse after spinal 
cord had received news of the tap. But tap me on the head: 
I may think that over for fifty years before I thank you and 
admit that you were quite justified, and thereby end my re- 
action in adjustment. Insult my child by just one word: I 
may devote my life to the destruction of you and your family 
and all that you hold dear. Some rulers have gone to war 
for less. Human intelligence has taken such bents. But as 

482 





FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE NEWER PSYCHOLOGY 


Dr. Johnson said, “God Himself, sir, does not propose to 
judge man until the end of his days.” Why should we? 

Man, as no other animal does, can delay his reactions 
whereby he adjusts himself to circumstances; he thereby 
gains a measure of control over his environment denied all 
other living beings. Such control is biologic freedom, the 
goal of creative evolution. Intelligence. What this control 
can lead to is just beginning to be understood. Scientific in- 
telligence may yet be born. Freedom is as yet only a goal 
and a long way off, but progress toward freedom will speed 
up; it is of the nature of living organisms to grow by what 
they feed on and to climb by their own steps; the greater 
freedom, the faster the pace toward the goal. 

That is, if man is really on the track—and that we cannot 
know. We do know that countless kinds of living organisms 
dropped from sight because they were on a by-path. But 
assuming that man is on the road of freedom, how can he 
keep going? Is there anything in his nature which conditions 
progress—as there are hormones which regulate growth? 
There is something which suggests a parallel. 

Why is man not as free as he might be? Because his mind 
is made up; his pride of opinion outweighs his desire to 
know; he dismisses realities with a “‘God’s in His Heaven— 
All’s right with the world,” and neglects the first lesson he 
ever learned—which is, that he can learn. Because he re- 
fuses the dare thrown to him by nature herself: Know thyself ; 
and refuses to heed the warning written across every page 
of history and strewn across the face of the earth itself: the 
best defense is offense, versatility rather than walls or armor- 
plate, foresight rather than hindsight. Man alone can set 
man free. 

The human being that can learn no more has parted with the 
only priceless possession in human inheritance. The men, 
women, or nations that harden in their mould, get set in 
their ways, crystallize their opinions and beliefs, and swear 
by and live according to their routine habits—such men, 

483 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


women, or nations are old; senile decay is at hand. In them 

creative evolution has ceased to function. And they, in their 

vain yearnings for immortality, forget how they learned to 

behave like human beings and how life itself in human 

beings renews its youth and speeds up the race for freedom: 
As A LITTLE CHILD, WITH AN OPEN MIND. 








BIBLIOGRAPHY 


(The books named below do not constitute a bibliography of 
man, merely the more important of the recent works consulted in 
the preparation of this volume. Those to which I am especially 


indebted, and from which I have drawn freely, are indicated by an 
asterisk. ) 


* ARMSTRONG, E. F. Enzymes. Ch. XIV, Colloidal Behavior. New 
York, 1924. 

Bercson, H. Creative Evolution. London, 1922. 

Bium_er, G. (editor) Billings-Forchheimer’s Therapeusis of In- 
ternal Diseases. New York, 1924. | 

Boas, F. The Mind of Primitive Man. New York, 1922. 

BocuE, R. H. (editor) Colloidal Behavior. New York, 1924. 

Bracc, Sir WILLIAM. Concerning the Nature of Things. New York, 
1925. 
*Cannon, W. B. Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage. 
New York, 1922. | 
*Carutson, A. J. The Control of Hunger in Health and Disease. 
Chicago, 1916. 

“Organotherapeutics,” in Billings-Forchheimer’s Therapeusis 
of Internal Diseases. Blumer Edition. New York, 1924. 

*CHAMBERLIN, T. C. The Origin of the Earth. Chicago, 1918. 

*CuItp, C. M. Senescence and Rejuvenescence. Chicago, 1915. 

Individuality in Organisms. Chicago, 1915. 

The Origin and Development of the Nervous System. Chicago, 
1921. 

——Physiological Foundations of Behavior. New York, 1924. 

Davenport, C. B. Heredity in Relation to Eugenics. New York, 
1911. 

DENIKER, J. The Races of Man. New York, 1900. 

*Du Bois, E. F. Basal Metabolism in Health and Disease. Philadel- 
phia, 1924, 


% 








*% 





485 


WHY WE BEHAVE LIKE HUMAN BEINGS 


Duckworth, W. L. H. Morphology and Anthropology. Cambridge, 
1915. 

EpMAN, I. Human Traits. Boston, 1920. 

Exuis, H. Man and Woman. New York, 1914. 

GEDDES AND THomson. Sex. New York, 1914. 

Happon, A. C. The Races of Man. New York, 1925. 

Harrow, B. Glands in Health and Disease. New York, 1922. 

*HENDERSON, L. J. The Fitness of the Environment. New York, 
1913. 

“Herrick, C. J. An Introduction to Neurology. Philadelphia, 
1922. 

Neurological Foundations of Animal Behavior. New York, 
1924. 

“Howe, W. H. A Text-Book of Physiology. Philadelphia, 1922. 

Jennincs, H. S. Behavior of the Lower Organisms. New York, 
1915. 

JounsTonE, J. The Mechanism of Life. London, 1921. 

*Jones, F. W. Arboreal Man. London, 1916. 

*JorDAN, E. O. General Bacteriology. Philadelphia, 1924. 

KEANE, A. H. Man Past and Present. Cambridge, 1920. 

*KEIBEL AND MALL. Human Embryology. Philadelphia, 1910-1912. 

KeitH, A. Man. New York, 1912. 

The Engines of the Human Body. Philadelphia, 1920. 

—The Antiquity of Man. London, 1920. 

KENDALL, A. I. Civilization and the Microbe. Boston, 1923. 

KroEBER, A. L. Anthropology. New York, 1923. 

Loes, J. The Organism as a Whole. New York, 1916. 

Regeneration. New York, 1924. 

*LuLL, R. S. Organic Evolution. New York, 1921. 

The Ways of Life. New York, 1925. 

MacCurpy. G. G. Human Origins. New York, 1924. 

MarsHa.i, F. H. A. Physiology of Reproduction. London, 1922. 

*McCotium, E. V. The Significance of Colloids in the Dietary. 
Ch. XXIX, Colloidal: Behavoir. New York, 1924. 

McFaruanp, J. Biology. Philadelphia, 1920. 

METCHNIKOFF, E. The Nature of Man. New York, 1906. 

*MILLIKAN, R. A. The Electron. Chicago, 1924. 

Minot, C.S. The Problem of Age, Growth, and Death. New York, 
1908. 


& 














486 





ee 


BIBLIOGRAPHY 


*MiTcHELL, P. H. General Physiology. New York, 1923. 

Newman, H. H. Readings in Evolution, Genetics, and Eugenics. 
Chicago, 1921 

Osporn, H. F. The Origin and Evolution of Life. New York, 1921. 

Parker, G. H. Smell, Taste, and Allied Senses in the Vertebrates. 
Philadelphia, 1922. , 

*PEARL, R. Biology of Death. Philadelphia, 1922. 

Studies in Human Biology. Baltimore, 1924. 

Pearson, K. The Chances of Death. London, 1897. 

—The Grammar of Science. London, 1900. 

RoBertson, T. B. Principles of Biochemistry. Philadelphia, 1924. 

ScHaFER, E. A. The Endocrine Organs. London, 1916. 

Tuompson, D. W. Growth and Form. Cambridge, 1917. 

Tuomson, J. A. The System of Animate Nature. New York, 1920. 

THORNDIKE, E. L. The Original Nature of Man. New York, 1923. 

Wa ter, H. E. Genetics. New York, 1913. 

—The Human Skeleton. New York, 1918. 

Wasusurn, M. F. The Animal Mind. New York, 1923. 

*Watson, J. B. Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist. 
Philadelphia, 1924. 

Behaviorism. New York, 1925. 

*WIEDERSHEIM, R. The Structure of Man. London, 1895. 

Wivver, H. H. History of the Human Body. New York, 1909. 

Witson, E. B. The Cell in Development and Heredity. New York, 
1925. 








437 








y 








ce 





ayy 
ye 
yy te 





INDEX 


Abel, Prof. John J., vi 
on Adrenin, 210 
on blood, 173 
on hormones, 203 
on kidneys, 186 
on pituitary, 216 
Abdominal viscera, 235 
Abnormalities, causes of, 24 
variations of, 24 
Absorption, 133 
Acetaldehyde, from pyruvic acid, 121 
Acids, Amino-, 142, 146, 154, 156, 157, 
158 
butyric, 158 
capric, 158 
caproic, 158 
caprylic, 158 
hydrochloric, 146, 150 
manufacture of, 185 
lactic, 326, 327 
nucleic, 151 
oleic, 141 
tri-iodo-tri-hydro-oxyindole propion- 
ic, 206 
Bric. 22k 
Acidosis, 207 
Acos, 203 
Acquiring Human Behavior, 336-415 
Acromegaly, 217 
Action, osmotic, 304 
reflex, 284, 308, 309 
Adam’s apple, 8, 134 
Adaptation, 391 
of human ovum, 3 
Addison’s disease, 239 
symptoms of, 209, 210 
Adenoids, growth, 134 
Adiposity, 434 
Adolescence, changes physical and 
mental, 36 


Adrenal cortex, 230, 232, 238, 239 
medulla, 239 

Adrenalin, 210, 211, 212, 240 
action of on blood vessels, 211 
results from, 21i, 212 

Adrenals, 208, 209, 210, 215, 228 
accessory, 215 
location of, 202 
variations in, 209 

Adrenin, 210, 211, 214, 239, 368, 
characteristics of, 211 

Afferent, 288 

African, compared with other types, 


Agamic reproduction, 246 
Agar-agar, 140 
Age, changes in old, 37 
Age of Fishes, Paleozoic, 63 
of Mammals, Cenozoic, 63 
of Man, Psychozoic, 63 
of Reptiles, Mesozoic, 63 
orders of, 69 
of Steam, 64 
Agents, immunity, development of, 
204 
regulating, development, 203 
Agglutinin, 176 
Air, complemental, 170 
residual, 170 
supplemental, 170 
Air-sacs, work of, 124, 125 
Albinos, cause of, 14 
Aldrich, on adrenin, 210 
Algz, one-celled, 95, 145, 465 
Alimentary canal, 19, 133, 134, 405, 
428 
formation of, 19 
lining of, 133 
muscles in, 133 
organs developed from, 19 
serous coat, 134 


489 


INDEX 


Allantois, action of, 72 
Allen, on ovaries, 227 
Ambergris, 152 
Ameba, 78, 94, 96, 125, 189, 200, 247 
ZOO MAT Hea loMmel awe ioe aad eo 
334, 344, 442, 450 
characteristics of, 78 
Jennings on, 273 
life in, 125 
processes of, 450 
reaction of, 334 
where found, 189 
Ameboid movement, of protoplasm, 78 
Amenorrhea, 217 
Amentia, 458 
America a Family Matter, Gould, 119 
Amino-acids, see Acids, amino 
Ammonia, 88 
Ammonium, 292 
Amnion, 4, 72 
Amniotic fluid, 72 
Amphibians, man’s inheritance from, 
74 
Amphioxus (lancelet), 74, 76 
relation to vertebrates, 76 
Amplifier, in man, 57 
Amylase, 150 
Anabolism, 127 
Analysis, logical, 407 
Ancestors, effect on race, 39 
inheritance from, 112 
number of, 112 
Anemia, 231 
Anemone, sea, skin of, 300 
Anglo-Saxon, as race, 43 
Animal life, geologic time-table of, 63 
Animal Mind, by Washburn, 270 
Animals, one-cell, Construction of, 6 
constant—temperature, 179 
segmented, 6 
unicellular, 1 
warm-blooded, 179 
Animism, 96 
Anthrax, bacillus of, see Bacillus, 
anthrax 
Anthropoids, development, 52 
Anomaly, 250 
Anoxemia, 175 


Antediluvian ectoderm, 253 
Antibodies, 149, 176, 177, 203, 249 
Antigens, 176, 177 
Antiricin, 198 
Antitoxins, 198 
Ants, fossil, 62 
Apes, babies of, 56 
anthropoid, kin to men, 49 
similarity to men, 50 
Appetite, complex, 424, 425, 426 
Aorta, 164, 167, 168 
branches of, 8 
Apes, Anthropoid, 4 
manlike (Simiidae), 49 
Appendix, 21 
Arabinose, 139 
Archeozoic Era, 63 
Arcs, reflex, 365, 366, 439 
Arm, modifications of, 54 
Armpits, 162 
Arms, variation of muscles in, 30 
Armstrong, on enzymes, 147 
Aromatic amino alcohol, formula for, 
210 
Arsphenamin, “606,” 200 
Arteries, 8, 159 
carotid, 8 
pulmonary, 8 
Arteriosclerosis, 164 
Artery, construction of, 164 
pulmonary, 168 
Arthropods, joint-foot, 76 
Asiatic cholera, cure for, 200 
Association of ideas, 70 
Asthma, bronchial, 212 
Ataxia, Locomotor, 342 
Atmosphere, composition of, 81, £ 
elements of, 87 
Atom, nucleus of, size, 85 
smallest unit of elements, 84 
Atomic number, 84 
Atoxyl, 200 
Atrophic cirrhosis, 152 
Atrophy, 230, 239 
Auricles 22, 165, 167 
formation of, 22 


490 





INDEX 


Australian blacks, 46 

Autocoid substances, 203 

Autodestruction, 179 

Autonomic nervous system, 213, 214 
nerves, 366 
system, 324, 325 

Axis, vision of, 409 

Axons, 288 


Babies, apes, 56 
blue, 169 
lemur, 56 
monkey, 56 . 
Baboons (cercopithecidae), 49 
Bacilli, tubercular, 164, 199 
Bacillus, 195 
anthrax, 198, 207 
hay, 197 
Backbone, 7 
end of, 27 
Bacteria, 79, 95, 130, 131, 132, 153, 
16201163.51176,0170 (7186, 190,195, 
196, 197, 199, 200, 255, 256, 268, 465 
chromogenic, 195 
different strains of, 199 
filterable, 196 
forms of, 195 
immunity from, how acquired, 200 
in dead horse, 131 
in large intestine 153 
in life, 130 
innoxious, 195 
in one gram of soil, 131 
nitrogen-fixing, 131, 132 
noxious, 195 
pathogenic, 195, 197 
plague, how carried, 190 
plants, or animals? 79 
psyche of, 268 
psychology, 268 
saprophitic, 195 
sea scavengers, 132 
sulphur, 95 
ultramicroscopic, 196 
uses of, 79 
zymogenic, 195 
Bacteriology, 200 


Bacterium, 158, 163 
Bacteremia, 198 
Banting, isolation of insulin, 219 
Barker, on hormones, 203 
Basal metabolism, rate of, 397 
Bayers “205,” 199 
Bechold, on enzymes, 147 
on liver cells, 152 
Behavior, bisexual, 430, 431 
changes in, 469 
fashionable, 473 
human, and environmental, 469 
standard of, 470 
instinctive, 341, 417 
intelligent, 482 
marriage, 441, 442 
socially useful, 471 
society, 469 
somatic, 416 
unsocial, 473, 476 
unverbalized, 370, 372 
useful, 473 
Bergson, on “wits,” 62. . 
Beri-beri, 142 
Bibliography, 485-487 
Bile, 136, 151, 264 
secretion of, 185 
use of, 185 
Biology, coining of word, 102 
law of development, 3 
Biophores, 113 
Birth of earth and planets, 80 
Bisexual behavior, 430, 431 
Blastula, 5 
Blood, aérated, 171 
arterial, 167, 171, 185 
circulation of, 124 
clotting of, 161 
composition of, 88 
difference in species, 176 
functioning of, 159, 160 
peripheral, 182 
venous, 167, 174 
blood-cells, red, 177 
description and work, 174 
Blumenbach’s scheme of races, 38, 


39 


491 


INDEX 


Boas, Prof. Franz, viii, 39, 45 
grouping of man, 45 
Body, change in proportions, 33 
growth processes, 201, 202 
task of, 36 
Body-cells, planarian, 107 
Boils, cause of, 197 
Bone, sphenoid, 215 
Bones, episternal, 26 
facial, 34 
frontal, 28 
growth of, 34 
nasal, 28 
skull-dome, 34 
upper arm, formation of, 27 
Brain, O11 2063210 30,15 (ado: 
65, 70, 237, 280, 295, 297, 298, 305, 
310, 316, 319, 329, 458 
cells of, 10 
correlation with hand, 70 
cortex, 280, 297, 298, 305, 319, 458 
distinguishing features of man’s, 70 
formation of, 10 
Herrick on the, 329 
loss of weight with age, 37 
microcephalous, 10 
size of, 11 
weight of, 11 
use of, 1], 12 
Mitchell on the, 316 
necessity of big, 65 
sizes of, 237 
stem, 310 
structural changes, 10 
weight of, 32, 33, 42 
compared to body, 58 
in proportion to spinal cord, 58 
Breathing, rate for adolescents, 172 
rate for adults, 172 
rate for children, 172 
rate for newborn, 172 
Breeding, rates of productivity, 98 
' variations in, 99 
Bromine, 88 
Bronchi, 169 
Bufagin, 210, 211 


Caisson, 172 
Calcium metabolism, 207 
Calorie, “great calorie,” 127 
Calories, 88, 128, 129, 156, 178 
number expended in various occu- 
pations, 128, 129 
number required for growth, 128, 
129 
potential energy, number in, 128 
produced daily by man, 88 
Cambrian era, 74 
Canal, alimentary, 405 ! 
Canals, semilunar, 13 
Canine teeth, in apes, 71 
Cannon, Prof. Walter B., viii, 136, 
2ISmi214N2lo 
on adrenals, 215 
on adrenin, 213, 214 
time of movements, 136 
Capacity, vital, 170 
Capillaries, 154, 159, 161, 162, 165 
Capuchin, brain of, 52. 
Carbohydrates, 130, 138, 139, 156, 184 
digestion of, 184 
forms of, 130 
specific, 139 
structure of, 138 
Carbon, 90, 91, 94, 130 
behavior of, 91 
composition of, 94 
importance of, 91 
necessity of, 130 
relation with other elements, 91 
dioxide, 72, 79, 89, 121, 124, 130, 
171,172,173, 174,175 e203 ae 
composition of, 89 
excess in blood, 124 
from glucose, 121 
functions of, 203 
in air, 130 
in blood, 72 
prevalence of, 89 
Cardio-vascular apparatus, 216 
Carlson, Prof. A. J., viii, 206, 207, 
227, 238 
on endocrines, 238 
on tetany, 207 
on thyroid, 206 


492 


INDEX 


Carnegie Laboratory of Embryology, 5 
Carotid arteries, 8 
Cartilage, 7 
Cartilages, of larynx, 233 
thyroid, 8 
Casein, 150 
Castle, Prof. W. E., viii 
Catalyzer, 146, 220, 232, 268, 330, 331 
Catalyzers, development of, 204 
of development, 232 
Cataract of eye, 13 
Cattell, Dr. McKean, viii 
Caucasian race, where found, 45 
Cebidae (monkeys), 49 characteris- 
tics of, 52 
Cecum, 136 
in herbivorous animals, 140 
Celibacy, 434, 439 
Cell, characteristics of, 94, 95 
metabolism, 398 
Cells, bone-forming growth of, 34 
division of, 110 
floating, 1 
Leydig, 231 
life in tissue, 122 
occurrence, l, 2 
Cellulose, 140, 153, 195 
in plants, 140 
Cementum, 288 
Cenozoic Age, 63 
Centrosomes, behavior of, 110, 111 
Cercopithecidae (baboons), 49 
characteristics of, 51 
Cerebellum, 310, 311, 312, 313 
Cerebral cortex, 310, 318, 321, 329, 
332 
Cerebri, hypophysis, 215 
Cerebrum, 310, 313, 314, 315, 316, 317 
Gall on the, 315 
Chamberlain, Foundations of WNine- 
teenth Century Civilization, 119 
Chamberlin, geologist, 80, 81 
Change, continuous, 92 
Character, 444, 461, 472 
foundations of, 472 
Characters, acquired, 102 
Charlatans, 462 
Chaulmoogra oil, 200 


Chemical receptors, 298 
Chemotherapy, 200 
Child, on excitation, 277 
on nerves, 288 
study of flatworms, 107 
Children, rachitic, 143 
Chimpanzee, characteristics of, 50 
Chin, mental point, 28 
Chlorine, 83, 137 
Chlorophyll, 130 
Cholelith, 152 
Cholera, 231 
Asiatic, cure for, 200 
germs of, 197 
Cholesterol, 151, 152 
Chromatin, 77, 110 
Chromogenic bacteria, 195 
Chromophilic substance, 331, 332 
Chromosomes, 110, 111, 112, 113, 
behavior of, 111 
inherited, 113 
number of, 110, 112 
Chyle, 154 
Chyme, 135 
Cilia, 78, 169, 269, 270, 414 
in protoplasm, 78 
Clairvoyants, 462 
Cleft, embryonic bronchial, 206 
Clefts, bronchial, 7, 
gill, 7, 8 
Climacteric, 228 
Cloaca (sewer) in human fetus, 16, 17 
Clotting, of blood, 161 
Cobra, venom of, 187, 198 
Coccus, 195 
Coccyx, tail skeleton, 27 
Cod, eggs of, 98 
Collip, on parathyroids, 208 
Colloids, development of, 94 
Color, biological significance of, 40 
in different races, 46, 47 
Complex appetite, 424, 425, 426 
hunger, 425, 426 
libido, 427 
reproduction, 428 
Compounds, organic, 137 
number of, 91 


493 


INDEX 


Comte, on biology, 237 
Conditioning of reflex arcs, 379, 385 
Conduct, normal, 470 
Conjugation, of individuals, 105 
Connective tissue, 6 
from thymus, 208 
Consciousness, 314 
critical, 476 
Contents, xi-xiv 
Corals, 75 
Cord, spinal, 310 
umbilical, 168 
Cornea, 13 
Corpus luteum, 226, 228 
Cortex, 209, 238, 239, 280, 282, 289, 
2975) 2982") 305) 1312. S163 LiiS1s, 
319, 321, 329, 332, 362, 402, 426, 
458 
adrenal, 238, 239 : 
brain, 280, 297, 298, 305, 319, 458 
cerebral, 310, 318, 321, 329, 332 
effect of removal, 209 
functions of, 209 
Herrick on, 318 
Woods Jones on, 316 
Coughing, effect of, 134 
Cramps, 325, 326, 327 
Cranial, 213 
nerve, 8 
nerves, 310 
Crests, iliac, 235, 236 
Cretinism, 238, 239 
Cretins, 205 
Croup, 199 
Cré6-Magnon man, characteristics of, 
48 
Crustacea, pre-Cambrian, 62 
Cryptorchic individuals, 230 
Crystalline, 156 
Crystalloids, in solution, 94 
Crystal, hemoglobin, 176 
Crystals, growth of, 95 
Culture, development of, 479 
Curare, 327 
Current, electrochemical, 148 
Cyanosis, 169, 174 
Cynocephalous (baboon), character- 
istics of, 51 


Cynodont, 71. 

Cysts, dermoid, 25 
cause of, 25 

Cytoplasm, mass of, 288 


Darwin, 13, 97, 98, 99, 104, 113 
“ovemmules,” 113 
origin of species, 104 
Darwin’s point, 13 
Davenport, 102, 114, 117, 118 
investigations in Jukes case, 117, 
118 
on atavistic characters, 114 
Death, causes of, 254 
natural, 37, 38 
man’s consciousness of, 478 
Pearl on, 252, 254 
rate, 253 
decline of, 260 
Decrement, 283 
Degeneracy, in food canal, 21 
Delage, experiments in fertilization, 
108 
Delirium tremens, 231 
Dementia, 458 
precox, 221 
Dendrites, 331 
Dendrons, 288, 289 
Dental germs, ridges and cross ridges, 
20 
Dentine, 288 
Dentition, adaptations of, 19 
permanent, 36 
Derbyshire neck, 2C5 
Dermis, 14 
Descartes, on pineal, 218 
Detumescence, process of, 432 
De Vries, mutants, 101 
mutation theory, 100 
Development of diurnal habits, 399 
Devonian Period, 73 
Dextrin, 150 
Dextrose, 139-151 
Diabetes, 216, 217, 219, 220, 300 
insipidus, 216, 217 
mellitus, 216 
Dialysis, 155 
Diffusion, 155 


494, 





INDEX 


Digesters, parasitic, 141 
Digestion, 133, 136, 141, 146, 155 
and heat, 136 
chemistry of, 146 
mechanics of, 146 
organs of, 136 
process of, 133, 134 
Digestive organ, 414 
system, 133 
Digitalis, 210 
Di-hydroxymethyl-aminoethylol 
zine, 210 
Diphtheria, 199, 200, 256 
immunity from, 200 
Disaccharides, composition of, 139 
Disease, Addison’s, 239 
Graves’, 205 
Diseases, rat- flea-borne, 187 
Diurnal habits, development of, 399 
Division, direct, 110 
mitotic, 110 
Dogma of Evolution, L. T. More, 101 
Doisy, on ovaries, 227 
Donkey, heart-beats of, 166 
Dreams, 400, 401, 402, 403 
Drive, emotional, 478 
emotional, forces of, 475 
Dropsy, 161, 210 
remedies for, 210 
Dryopithecus, branches of, 57 
Du Bois, on fats, 141 
on heat, 183 
on skin, 182 
Dubois, 48 
Duct, excretory, 231 
seminiferous, 18 
Dwarfs, cause of, 34 
true, 47 
Dwight, Thomas, vi 
Dynamics, Visceral, 352 
Dysentary, amebic, cure for, 200 
Dystrophia adiposogenitalis, 217 


ben- 


Eagle, structure more specialized than 
man, 62 

Ear, external, cartilege of, 7 
formation of, 12, 13 
inner bones of, 7 


Ear, lobe of, 13 
muscles of, 13 
Eardrum, 13 
Earth, core of, 81 
formation and growth of, 81 
organic deposits of, 79, 80 
origin of, 81 
Earthworms, organization of, 76 
East, Mankind at the Crossroads, 119 
Eccles, on parasites, 186 
Ectoderm, 5, 6, 14, 253, 254 
antediluvian, 253 
Edema, 161 
Effector, 305 
Efferent, 289 
Eggs, complexity of, 72 
effect of thymus on shells, 208 
of reptiles, 73 
personal incubation, 71 
varieties and development, 72 
Elements (L M N’s), combinations 
of, 83 
four necessary, 83° 
number of, 85 
radioactive, 85 
stable, 85 
transmutability of, 85 
unit of, 85 
Electricity, in matter, 86 
Electrolytes, 88 
Electron, structure of, 86 
Electrons, behavior of, 470 
negative, 84 
positive, 84 
Elephant, breeding rate, 98 
heart-beats of, 166 
elephantiasis, 161, 162 
Elixirs, 241, 255 
Ellis on erogenous zones, 395 
Embryonic bronchial cleft, 206 
Embryo, abnormal development of, 25 
cells of, 3 
development of, 4, 8 
food of, 4 
growth of, 6 
human, adrenal in, 209 
at bronchial-cleft stage, 21 
nourishment of, 72 


495 


INDEX 


Embryo, stages of development, 5 
blastula, 5 
gastrula, 5 
morula, 5 
Emotional organization, 378 
qualities, McDougall on, 418 
reinforcement, 358 
Emotions, 362 
End receptors, 288 
Endemic goiter, 205 
Endocrine, 239 
gland, 14, 204, 214, 220, 227, 251, 
262 
development of, 204 
Endocrine Glands and the Causes of 
Death, 201—262 
Endocrines, 202, 206, 219, 224, 232, 
238, 240, 241 
arrest of development, 240 
Carlson on, 238 
Keith on, 241 
new science of, 219 
over-stimulation of, 240 
Endocrinology, 216 
Endoderm, 5, 6, 254 
Energy, conversion of, 125, 126 
fuel for, 127 
necessity of, 120 
sun’s, 93, 94 
Enterokinase, 151 
Environment, 274 
fitness of, 86 
Enzyme, 179 
luciferase, 268 
Enzymes, 136, 146, 147, 148, 184, 185, 
2035204 7220-53531 
changes in, 141 
discovery of, 203 
of pancreas, 136 
Eocine times, use of teeth in, 71 
Epidermis, 14 
Epiglottis, 8, 299 
Epilepsy, 221 
Epinephrin, 210, 211, 216 
Epiphyses, appearance of, 33 
Epithelum, 206 
Epithyroid gland, 19 


Equilibrium, dynamic, 126 
of body, 172 
sense of, in ear, 13 
Erepsin, 151 
Ergot, 216 
Erogenous zone, 432, 439, 440 
Ellis on, 395 
Erythrocytes, 173 
Eskimo, 141 
skulls of, 43 
Esophagus, 134, 146, 421 
passage to, 134 
work of, 146 
Ether-waves, 295, 296 
vibrations, table of, 295 
Ethyl-alcohol, 264, 301 
Eugenics Society, 115 
Eunuchs, 224 
Eustachian tube, 8 
Evans, on Vitamin x, 144 
Evolution, agencies of, 99 
animal, 95, 96 
control of, 116 
creative, 481 
inorganic elements to organic com- 
pounds, 82 
laws of process. 104 
of the Earth, Lite, and Sex, 60-119 
organic, 477 
plant, 95, 96, 
Excitation, Child on, 277 
Excretion, 133 
organic substances in, 68 
Excretory duct, 231 
Exophthalmic goiter, 205 
Exteroceptors, 298, 302 
Extract, thyroid, feedings of, 205 
Extracts, luteal, 228 
ovarian, 228 
Eyeball, formation, 13 
Eyes, cornea of, 13 
eyeball, 13 
formation of, 13 
lens of, 13 
“Mongolian,” 14 
optic nerve, 13 
Primates, 70 


496 


> —-. 


INDEX 


Eyes, retina, 13 
stereoscopic effects, 70 


Face, uses of, 36 
Fallopian tubes, 2, 17. 
formation of, 17 
Family, hearth of, 478 
Fashion, influences of, 473 
Fat-soluble A, 143 
storage of, 156 
Fats, 141 
digestion of, 184 
synthesization of, 130 
Feet, proportions of, 35 
Fertilization, changes during, 1}. 
experiments in, 108 
one species from another, 108 
Fetal skin, 14 
Fetus, 4, 17, 25, 208, 228 
a parasite, 25 
development of, 4 
membranes of, 4 
sex in, 17 
thymus in, 208 
Fever, dengue, germs of, 196 
quartan, 192 
relapsing, 196 
cure for, 200 
scarlet, 199 
Texas, 199 
typhoid, 199 
typhus, 192 
yellow, germs of, 196 
Fibrin, 160, 161 
Fibrinogen, 160 
Finger, opposable first, 66 
Fingers, extra, cause of, 24, 25 
Fish, adaptations from fin of, 103 
thyroid gland in, 204 
Fishes, contributions to animal life, 75 
man’s debt to, 74 
Fishworm, form, 76 
Flat feet, cause of, 35 
Flatworms, 75 
planarian, behavior of, 107 
Flexor muscles, 30 
Fluorine, uses of, 137 


Fly, tsetse, 199 
Follicles, Graafian, 226, 227 
Food, absorption of, 154, 155 
colloidal nature of, 138 
effect on structure, 108 
how consumed by cells, 145 
in small intestine, 151 
predigested, 158 
travel through alimentary canal, 
134, 135 
Food-hunger, 466 
Foods, inorganic, 137 
Foot, changes in human, 27, 56 
influence on civilization, 65, 66 
Pithecanthropus, 56 
primitive five-toed, 66 
Foot-and-mouth disease, germs of, 196 
Foramen ovale, 168, 169 
Formaldehyde, 145 
Foundations of Nineteenth Century 
Civilization, Chamberlain, 119 
Fovea, center of, 409 
Freedom, 481 
biologic, 483 
Freemartins, 225 
Freud, on psychosis, 369 
Freudian psychoses, 448 
Freudism, 449 
Freudists, 462 
Frontal bone, 28 
Fructose (“fruit-sugar”), 139, 146 
Fuel, for body, 125 


Gait, upright, changes caused by, 26 
changes in acquiring, 34 

Galactose, 139, 151 

Gall, on cerebrum, 315 
on cholesterol, 151 

Galton, Francis, predictions of, 117 

Gambetta, size of brain, 11 

Gametic reproduction, 246 

Ganglia, 324, 418 

Gastric juice, 135, 221, 426, 427 
tetanus, 351 

Gastrula, 5 

Geddes (quoted), 105 

Geikie, 80 

Gels, 160 


497 


INDEX 


Gemmules, 113 
Genealogic time-table, 60 
Genetic behavior, 267 
history, 416 
Genus Homo, 204, 264 
Germ-cell, fertilized ovum, 2 
Germ-cells, 3, 107 
Germ-layers, ectoderm, 5, 6 
endoderm, 5, 6 
mesoderm, 5, 6 © 
Germ-plasm, theory of continuity, 117 
Germs, disease-producing, 193 
malaria, quinine for, 200 
Gibbon, (Hylobates), characteristics 
of 517 62,053 
fingers of, 66 
hand of, 66, 
young of, 68 
Gill-arch, 7, 206 
Gill-clefts, 7 
Girdle, pelvic, 26, 233, 235 
Gland, endocrine, 185, 204, 220, 227 
lachrymal, 286 
pineal, 218 
pituitary, 215 
Glands, adrenal, 213 
behavior under operations, 202 
duct, 185 
functions of, 201 
endocrine, see Endocrine glands 
epithyroid, 19 
exocrine, 185 
female, changes in, 17 
food-digestion, 184, 185 
functions of different, 15, 16 
gastric, 184 
hormonopoietic, 203 
lachrymal, 14, 184 
male, 17 
migration of, 17 
mammary, 16, 224, 228 
milk, 16 
odoriferous, 15 
of stomach, 135 
pituitary, 19 
salivary, 134, 320, 321 
sebaceous, 15, 184 
secretions of, 185 


Glands, sex, 208, 244 
function of, 202 
supernumerary, 16 
sweat, 15 
thymus, 19 
use of, 184 
thyroid, 19 
Glandular system, 346 
Globin, 175 
Glottis, 415 
Glucose, 139, 146, 150, 156, 220 
chemical changes in, 121 
formula, 90 
formation of, 121 
in liver, 136 
solar energy in, 90 
Glycerin, 141, 154 
Glycerol, 154 
Glycogen, 140, 156, 259 
conversion to glucose, 121 
in liver, 136 
in muscles, 123 
Goiter, 205, 231 
endemic, 205 
exophthalmic, 205 
toxic, 205, 239 
Golden rule, practice of, 470 
Gonad hormones, regulators of sex 
characters, 232 
operations, 222, 238 
Gonadectomy, 230 
Gonads, 221, 224, 226 
absence of, 230 
characteristics of male and female, 
18 
development of, 18 
male, 229 
transplantation of, 231 
Gonorrhea, 199 
Gorilla, characteristics of, 50 
Gould, America a Family Matter, 119 
Graafian follicles, 226, 227 
maturity of, 2 
Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, 
119 
Granulobacillus saccharo - butyricus 
mobilis non-liquefaciens, 194 


498 





INDEX 


Grape-sugar, 139 
Graves’ disease, 205 
Grimaldi man, 48 
Groins, 162 
Growth, and life, 78 
forces of, 122 
power, at birth, 32 
Guanidin, actions of, 207 


Habit, inherited, 341, 343 
Habits, 388, 389 
breaking of, 393, 394 
Hair, growth of, 15 
index of type, 41 
variations in, 43 
Hairy Ainu, 15 
Hand, fetal, 67 
influence on civilization, 65 
utility of, 54 
Hands, development of, 55 
of Primates, 66, 67 
Hapalidae (marmosets), 49 
Hate, 431, 432 
Head, movements of, 35, 36 
Heart, at branchial-cleft stage, 21, 22 
beating of, 165 
changes with age, 37, 38 
construction of, 124 
variations in structure, 22 
Heat, a form of energy, 177 
Heidelberg man, 48, 57 
Height, 33 
Hematin, 175, 176 
crystallization of, 176 
Hemin, amount of, 177 
Hemocyanin, copper of, 171 
Hemoglobin, 173, 174, 175 
iron of, 171 
Hemolytic, 176 
Hemophilia, 161 
Hemorrhages, use of adrenin in, 211 
Henderson, fitness of 
86, 87 
(quoted), 89 
Heredity, and energy, 93 
questions of, 112, 113 
Hermaphrodite, true, 76 


environment, 


Hermaphrodites (Hermes-Aphrodite}, 
cause of, 18 
in plants and lower animals, 18 
Hernia, cause of, 17 
Herrick, Prof. C. Judson, viii, 273, 
$18;3329..370 
on brains, 329 
on psychology, 273 
on the cortex, 318 
Hertzian waves, 296, 298, 306 
Hexapoda, 188 
Hirudin, 161 
Homing - instinct, 337 
Hominidae (men), 49 
Homo, from apes, 57 
Homo (genus) Sapiens 
44, 264 
Hookworm, 188 
Hormone, 17, 208, 216, 220, 224 
and sex, 17 
structure acted on, 17 
pineal, 218 
production of, 227 - 
secretion system of, 384 
thyroid, 205 
Hormones, 203, 204, 221, 225, 226. 
232, 239, 240, 265, 450 
discovery of, 203 
gonad, 232 
of growth, 204 
production of, 221, 239 
sex, 226 
thyroid, 225 
Hoskins, Prof. R. G., viii, 206 
on thyroid, 206 
Howell, on enzymes, 149 
on heat, 182 
Hrdlicka, 58 
Human Anatomy, Quain, v 
Human Embryology, Keibel 
Mall, v 
Human Embryology, Minot, v 
Human morphology, 416 
physiology, 416 
Humerus, at 15 years, 33 
free, 67 
Hunger, 421, 422, 423, 424, 425, 426 
complex, 426, 428 


(species), 


and 


499 


INDEX 


Huxley, 43 
on protoplasm, 78 
Hydrogen, atomic number of, 84 
importance of, 91 
molecular behavior, 93 
Hydrolysis, changes during, 147 
Hydrophobia, germs of, 196 
Hypophysis cerebri, 215 
Hydrosphere, 81, 82, 
Hyoid apparatus, 7 
Hypothyroidism, 206 


Icthyosis hysterix, 181 
Iguanadon, 67 
Iliac crests, 235, 236 
Immunity agents, development of, 204 
Immunology, 200 
Impotence, 238 
Impulses, in human beings, force of, 
475 
sensory, 315 
Incisors, 36 
Incubator, vade mecum, 73 
India, sacred cattle of, 141 
Indians, American, non immune, 199 
Individual Life Cycle and the Human 
Race, The, 1—59 
Infancy, biolcgic significance of, 372 
Infantile tetany, 207 
Infantilism, 238 
sexual, 217, 239 
Influenza, 199 
germs of, 196 
Inguinal canals, cause of hernia, 17 
Insanity, 317 
Insomnia, 396, 397 
Insulin, 219, 240 
Integrating Organ and Mechanism of 
Adjustment, The, 263—335 
Intelligence, 454 
Intermaxillaries, in fetal life, 28 
Interoceptors, 298 
Interstitial cells of Leydig, 229 
Intestinal juice, 135 
Intestine, large, size of, 136 
small, 135 
lining of, 135 


Intestines, work of, 146 
Intrauterine life, 226 
Invertase, 151 
Invertebrates, 7 
legs of, 67 
Iodine, 88 
use of, 206 
Ions, formation, 88 
Ipecacuanha, 200 
lrissi22) 
Iron, 88, 137 
Is America Safe 
McDougall, 119 
Islands of Langerhans, 219 
Itch, laryngeal, 383° 


for Democracy? 


Jacobson’s organ, 12 
James, William, on subtypes, 45 
Jaundice, 300 


Jaw, lower, 7 


Jaws, changes in, 28 
prognathic, 28 
Jellyfish, 75 
Jennings, on ameba, 273 
Johnson, Dr., quoted, 483 
Joint, mid-tarsal, 35 
Jones, Woods, on cortex, 316 
on evolution, 69 
Jordon, bacteria in one gram of soil, 
13 
on bacteria, 176, 195 
on tuberculosis, 193 
Juice, gastric, 220 
lack of, 214 
pancreatic, lack of, 214 
Jukes case, 117, 118 
Jupiter, origin, 81 


Kangaroo, feet of, 66 
Kaola, foot development of, 66 
Katabolism, 127, 399 
Kawakami, 143 
Keith, on endocrines, 241 
Kendall, isolation of thyroxin, 205 
Kidneys, 18, 185, 221 

function of, 18, 185 

true, description of, 18 


500 














INDEX 


Kidneys, types of, 18 
head kidney, 18 
true kidneys, 18 
Wolffian body, 18 
Kinesthetic organization, 340, 348, 371, 
378 
sense, 302, 349, 405 
Koch, on theory of disease, 194 
Kroeber, grouping of man, 45 


L M N’s, of nature, 83 
Lachrymal glands, 14, 286 
Lactase, 151 
Lacteals, 154, 155 
Lactic acid, 326, 327 
from glucose, 121 
from muscles, 123 
Lactose, 139 
Lamarck, (quoted), 97, 102 
Lancelet (amphioxus), 74 
Langerhans, Islands of, 219 
Language, learning of, 375 
Lanolin, 152 
Lanugo (down), 15 
Laryngeal itch, 383 
Larynx, 20,57; 299, 233,237 
change at puberty, 233 
human, 20, 57 
removal of, 377 
Lavoisier, vii, 219 
Leeuwenhoek, discoverer of bacteria, 
194 
Legs, of invertebrates, 67 
of joint-foot arthropods, 76 
of vertebrates, 67 
variation of muscles in, 30 
Lemur, babies of, 56 
fingers of, 66 
Lemuridae (lemurs), 49 
Lemurs (Lemuridae), 49 
hand of, 66 
type, 52 
Lens, of eye, 13 
Leprosy, bacillus of, 198 
cure for, 200 
Leptospira icteroides, 196 
Lesions, pyorrhea, 189 
Leukocytes. 163, 193 


Lever, second order, 35 

Levulose, 151 

Leydig cells, 230, 231, 232 
interstitial cells of, 229 

Libido, 449, 450, 451 
complex, 427 

Lichenin, 140 

Life, 58, 78, 79, 97, 98, 226, 464, 465, 
466, 477, 479, 480 
adult, beginning of, 58 
agencies of, 477 
freedom of, 479, 480 
in protoplasm, 78 
intellectual, 472 
intrauterine, 226 
prodigality of, 97, 98 
span, Karl Pearson on, 255 
speed of, 480 
tests of, 79 

Ligament, 342 
patellar, 341 

Ligaments, 311, 347, 349 

Light, as oxidizing agent, 144 
Loeb on, 293 
Watson on, 293 

Limb, type of first Primate’s, 67 

Lincoln, life of, 474 

Ling, eggs of, 98 

Lipase, 150 

Lipoids, 141 

Lips, formation of, 25 
hare-lipped, 25 

Lithium, 292 

Lithosphere, 81, 82 

Liver, 19, 21, 136, 184, 185, 202 
functions of, 136, 202 
variations, 21 
work of, 185 

Lockjaw, 207 

Locomotor ataxia, 342 

Loeb, experiments in fertilization, 108 
on light, 293 
shapes of living beings and crystals, 

95 

Logical analysis, 407 

Longevity, cases of, 37 

Love, detumescence of, 432 
Watson on, 433 


o01 


INDEX 


Luciferase, 399 
enzyme, 268 
Lull, Prof. Richard Swan, viii, 63, 77, 
101 
on Darwin, 101 
Lull, Richard Swan, Organic Evolu- 
tion, 63 
Lunar cycle, effect of thyroid on, 206 
Lung, azygos lobe, 21 
right and left, 19 
Lungs, air sacs of, 214 
description of, 169 
dried, 221 
lobes of, 21 
Luteal extracts, 228 
Luteum, corpus, 226, 228 
Lymph, 161, 163, 221, 250 
Lymphatics, 159, 161, 162 
Lymph-nodes, 162, 163 
Lysin, 176 


Macaques, species of, 51, 52 
MacCurdy, Prof. George Grant, viii 
Machnow, Russian giant, 201 
Magnesium, 137 
Malaria, 187 
germs, death for, 200 
Maltase, 150, 151 
Maltose, 139, 151 
Mamme, 16, 72, 229 
formation of, 16 
functions of, 16 
secretions of, 16 
Mammals, Oligocene, 69 
Mammary glands, 224, 228 
Man, culture of, 479 
mobility in, 67 
prehistoric, 59 
Mankind at the Crossroads, East, 119 
Marmosets (Hapalidae), 49 
fingers of, 66 
Marriage, 441, 442 
Mars, origin of, 81 
Marshall, on fertilization, 10: 
Marsupial, pouch, 68 
Masochist, 451 
Mastication mechanism, 274 
Mastigophora, 189 


502 


Mastoid processes, 36 
Mate-hunger, 430, 444, 446 
Maturation of sperm and ovum, 11] 
Maturity, sex, 232, 233 
McCollum, on enzymes, 148 
on formaldehyde, ‘145 : 
on predigested food, 158 P 
McDougall, Is America Safe for we ' 
mocracy?, 119 
on emotional qualities, 418 
McLeod, isolation of insulin, 219 
Measles, 199 
germs of, 196 
Mechanism, mastication, 274 
sensori-motor, 373, 378, 428 
variations in, 61 
vocal, 374 
Mechanisms, emotional-drive, 477 
keep-in-touch, 6 “- 
Medulla, 209, 210, 213, 239, 310, 311 
adrenal, 239 gq 
secretions of, 213 
Melanosis, 41 
Membrane, fetal, 4 
nasal mucous, 221 
nicitating, 14 
Memory, 385, 386 
Men (Hominidae), 49 
heart beats of, 166 
Mendel, Gregor, cult of, 114 
Mendelian characters, determination . 
of, 204 
factors, new, 115 
Mendel’s “law,” 114 
bases of, 114, 115 
Menopause, 2, 228 
Mental states, 272 
Mercaptan, 300 
Mercury, origin of, 81 
Mesentery, 21, 134, 162 
arrangement of, 21 
Mesoderm, 5, 6, 14, 254 
Mesozoic Age, 63 
Metabolism, 127, 128, 205, 207, 218, 
244, 251, 270, 275, 276, 330; 33m 
397; 398, 430 
basal, 128 
calcium, 207 





INDEX 


Metabolism, cell, 398 
neuron, 331 
processes of, 430 
rate of basal, 397 
sugar, 218 
Metazoa, 1, 76, 106, 186, 257 
ova and sperma, 106 
(subkingdom II), 76 
Metazoon, 257 
Method of thinking, 382, 383, 384 
Methylguanidin, 207 
Micrococci, 195 
Micro-organisms, assistance of, 141 
cause of higher forms of life, 80 
Milk-glands (mammae), 16, 72 
Millikan, composition of atoms, 84 
determination of elements, 85 
(quoted), 97 
Misfits, disappearance of, 470 
Mitchell, on the Brain, 316 
Molars, 36 
four-cusped, 71 
third, 36 
Molecule, smallest, weight of, 93 
Molecules, behavior of, 93 
disaccharides, 147 
monosaccharide, 147 
Molluscs, forms of, 76 
Mongoloid race, 45 
type, color, 46 
Monkeys (Cebidae), 49, 54, 55, 56 
babies of, 56 
hands of, 54, 55 
Monosaccharides, composition of, 13/ 
Monotremes, 72 
Monsters, artificially produced, 23 
variations of, 23, 24 
Moore, Dr. C. R., viii 
More, L. T., Dogma of Evolution, 101 
Moron, definition, 458 
Morons, 458, 459, 460 
Morphology, 267 
human, 416 
Morula, 5 
Mosquito, Anopheles, method of pro- 
duction, 191 


Motor areas, 316 
mechanism, characteristics of, 123 
man and oyster, 61 
Mouse, heartbeats of, 166 
Mouth, 6 
variations in, 22 
Movements, peristaltic, 136 
rhythmic, 136 
Mucin, 150 
Mucus, 169 
coat of, 153 
Muellerian ducts, 17 
Muscle, biceps, of Gibbon, 54 
palmar, 31 
pyramidalis, 30 
quadriceps femoris, 342 
risorius, 30 
skin, 29 
sphincter, of stomach, 135 
variations, in facial, 30 
visceral, 36] 
Muscles, 347, 349 
calf, 35 
composition of, 123 
facial, comparison 
man, 29 
flexor, 30 
groups of, 123 
jaw, 36 
mastication, 36 
number of, 29 
of alimentary canal, 133 
of stomach, 135 
rectus abdominus, 30 
serous, 134 
skeletal, 214, 361, 436 
sternalis, 30 
trained, efficiency of, 129 
Mystics, 462 
Myxedema, 205, 238, 239 


animal and 


Nails, finger and toe, 15 

Nasal mucous membrane, 221 

Natural Selection, 99 
effects of on race, 119 

Nature, experiments of, 65 
of things, 83 

Navel, 4 


903 


INDEX 


Neanderthal man, 48 
Neck, 162 
Negritos (see Pygmies) 
where found, 45 
Negro, characteristics of, 39, 40, 41 
Negroid division, where found, 44, 45 
Nephritis, 221 
Neptune, origin, 81 
Nerve, optic, 294, 295, 296 
sciatic, 289 
sensory, 307 
system, Watson on, 333 
Nerves, 288 
autonomic, 366 
Child on, 288 
cranial, 310 
sensory, 303 
sweat-gland, work of, 182 
vasomotor, 234 
Nervous system, mechanism of, 9, 10 
peripheral, 323 
structural development of, 10 
Neuritis, 288 
Neurofibrils, 331 
Neuromotor system, 207 
Neuron, 289, 319 
metabolism, 331 
Neurons, 288, 307, 311, 312, 343 
knots of, 324, 418 
Neuroses, 234, 450 
New Decalogue 
Wiggam, 119 
Newborn, heartbeats of, 166 
Nitrification, process of, 131 
Nitrogen, 172, 175 
per cent in body, 131 
protein, 157 
Nitrogenous salts, 79 
Nitroglycerin, 141 
Nordics, supremacy of, 43 
Nose, development of, 12 
use of, 411, 412 
Notochord, 7 
in human embryo, 74 
Noxious stimulus, 346 
Nuclease, 151 
Nuclei, 173 
Nucleins, 220 


The, 


of Science, 


Nucleoproteins, 151 
Nursery, development of, 68 
Nucleus (nux, nut), 77, 110 


Odoriferous glands, 15, 16 
Olfactory nerves, 12 
receptor, 300 
Oligocene times, mammals in, 69 
Oocytes, 111 
Operations, gonad, 222, 238 
Opsonin, 163, 176 
Optic nerve, 13, 294, 295 
Orang-utan (Simia satyrus), charace 
teristics of, 50 
Organic Evolution, 
Lull, 63 
Organization, emotional, 378 
kinesthetic, 340, 348, 371, 378 
sensori-motor, 273 
vasomotor, 457 
Organs, sensory, 318 
Osborne, 58, 69, 79, 100 
Osler, on arteries, 251 
Oslund, on vasectomy, 231 
Osmosis, 155 
Osmotic action, 304 
Ossification, centers of, in bones, 33 
Outline of History, H. G. Wells, 40 
Ova, 226 
female germ-cell, 2 
sources of, 227 
Ovarian extracts, 228 
Ovaries, 221, 225, 229 
Over-specialization, in nature, 62 
Ovum, 2, 4, 5, 9, 111, 208, 229, 247, 
266, 431 
behavior of, 111 . 
changes in, 111 . 
development of, 2 | 
discovery of, 2 | 
division of, 4, 5 
fertilization of, 2 
human, 208 
maturity of, 2 
nourishment of, 9 
number of, 2 


Oxidation, changes of, 120, 121 


Richard Swan 


204 


INDEX 


Oxidations, biologic, 156 
Oxide, formation of, 121 
Oxygen, 172, 175 
energy source, 90 
for embryo, 72 
importance of, 91 
necessity of, 122 
poisoning, 175 
Oxyhemoglobin, 175 
Oysters, productivity of, 98 


Paddles, as limbs, 67 
Palate, cleft, 25 
formation of, 25 
Paleopithecus, 57 
Paleozoic Age, 63 
Palm pad, 31 
Palmistry, 31 
Palmists, 461 
Pancreas, 19, 136, 151, 184, 202, 219, 
220, 221, 225, 238, 239 
as regulator of sugar metabolism, 
220 
function of, 202 
secretions of, 136 
Paracasein, 150 
Paralysis, infantile, germs of, 196 
Paramecium, 105 
productivity of, 98 
Parasites, 186 
Parasitism, problem of, 187 
Parathyroids, 238, 239 
Paresis, 342 
Parotids, where found and use of, 
184, 222 
Parovarium, 18 
Parthenogenitic volvox, 106 
Parathyrin, 208 
Parathyroid, where found, 202 
feedings, 207 
Parathyroids, 206, 207 
Passing of the Great Race, 
Grant, 119 
Pasteur, Louis, founder of biology, 
194 
Patellar ligament, 341 
Pathogenic bacteria, 195 


The, 


Pearl, on death, 252, 254 
Pearson, Karl, on Life Span, 255 
Pelvic girdle, 26, 233, 235 
Pelvis, shape of, 236 
Pepsin, 135, 150, 151, 177 
Pepsinogen, zymogen of pepsin, 148 
Peripheral nervous system, 323 
organ, 281 
Peristaltic movement, 135 
Peroxidase, 149 
Personality, 463, 464 
Perverts, sexual, 444 
Phagocyies, 163, 164, 177, 251 
Pharynx, construction of, 134 
Phosphorus, 137 
Photograph, 130 
Photosynthesize, 130 
Phrenologists, 461 
Phrenology, 452 
Physiology, human, 416 
Pigment, effect on skin, 41 
respiratory, 173 
Piltdown man, 48, 57: 
Pimples, cause of, 197 
Pineal, 239 
gland, 218 
harmone, 218 
where found, 202 
Pithecanthropus erectus, characteris- 
tics of, 48, 49, 57 
Pituitary, 19, 217, 218, 228, 230, 238, 
239 
gland, 19, 215 
where found, 202 
Pituitrin, 216, 240 
Placenta, 4, 73, 229 
development cf, 73 
Planetary system, 80 
Planets, terrestrial, 
Earth, 81 
Mars, 81 
Mercury, 81 
Venus, 81 
Plants, synthesization of sugars and 
fats, 130 
Plasma, 160, 161, 163, 173 
Plasmodium, life cycle of, 191 
Platelets, 161 


505 


INDEX 


Play, 353, 354 

Plica semilunaris, 14 

Pneumonia, 198, 199 

Polyps, 75 

Polysaccharides, composition of, 139 

Potassium, 137 
chlorides, 292 

Precipitin, 176 

Precocity, sexual, 238 

Prejudice, racial, 119 

Premolars, 36 

Primate, center of evolution of, 58 
evolution of, 62 
man’s ancestral, 71 

Primates, development of, 53, 479 
families of, 49 

Primordial protoplasm, 419 

Processes, mastoid, 36 

Processes of Living and the Germs 
of Disease, The, 120—200 

Progress, causes of, 476 
speeding up of, 64 

Propaganda, for right living, 474, 475 

Proprioceptors, 298, 302 

Prostitution, 439 

Protein, 175, 273 
built from, 142 
where found, 141 

Proteins, 131, 132, 141, 146, 156, 184 
digestion of, 184 
elements of, 131 
produced by plants, 132 

Proteoclast, 150 

Proterozoic era, 63 

Protoplasm, 1, 77, 86, 157, 158, 243, 
245, 246, 247, 261, 266, 269, 273, 
275, 276, 283, 287, 289, 330, 331, 
344, 417, 455, 465, 468 
carbon in, 91 
characteristics of, 77, 78 
composition of, 78 
functions of, 77, 78 
primordial, 419 
reaction of, 9 

Protozoa, 1, 140, 186, 189, 
283 
Sarcodina, 189 
(Subkingdom I), 76 


257, 269, 


Protozoon, 4, 75, 247 
Psyche, 263, 270, 333 
Psychic behavior, viii 
reflex, 320 
Psychics, 420 
Psycho-analysis, 268, 370 
Psycho-analyst, 461 
Psychology, 263, 267, 273, 416, 452 
Herrick on, 273 
human, 416 
Psychoses, 448, 450 
Freudian, 448 
Psychosis, 447 
Freud on, 369 
Psychozoic Age, 63 
Ptyalin, 150 
Puberty,’ 2, 224, 228, 232,236, 20a) 
253, 439, 442 
development of glands in, 16 
in cretins, 205 
thymus at, 208 
Pubes, 233 
Pulmonary artery, 8 
Pulse, rate with age, 37, 38 
Pygmies, stature of, 46, 47 
Pygmy, pure race, 44 
Pylorus, opening of, 135 
Pyramidalis, 30 
Pyruvic acid, from lactic, 121 


Quadriceps femoris muscle, 342 
Quadruplets, frequency of, 22 
Quotidian, 191 


Rabbit, heartbeats of, 166 
Race, determination of, 38 39 
Mongoloid, 44, 45 
Negroid, 44 
subtypes, 45 
Alpine, 45 
Hindu, 45 
Mediterranean, 45 
Nordic, 45 
Rate of basal metabolism, 397. 
Ratiocination, 407 
Reaction, biologic, 360 
somatic, 299 
visceral, 299 


506 





. 


; 
A 
: 
4 
: 
; 


7 


INDEX 


Receptor, 312 
of stimuli, 279 
olfactory, 300 
Receptors, 306 
chemical, 298 
somatic, 298 
visceral, 298 
Rectus abdominus, 30 
Reflex action, 308, 309 
acts, 396 
arc, 280 
arcs, 365, 366, 439 
conditioning of, 379, 385 
center, 281 
psychic, 320 
Regulating agents, development of, 
203 
Reinforcement, emotional, 358 
Rejuvenescence, 222, 244, 247 
Rennin, 150 
Reproduction, agamic, 246 
bisexual, 109 
complex, 428 
gametic, 246 
necessity of thyroid in, 206 
sexual, 430 
Reptiles, development of, 73 
giant, 71 
Resonators, laryngeal pouch, in Pri- 
mates, 57 
Response, 356 
Retina, 13, 221 
Rhodopsin, 412 
Ribs, first, 7 
floating, 26 
number and arrangement, 26 
Ricin, 198 
Riddle, on thymus, 208 


Sacral, 213 

Sacrum, 235, 236 
formation of, 26 

Sadism, 420 

Sadist, 451 

Saliva, 134 
lack of, 214 

Salivary glands, 320, 321 


Salt, nature of, 83 
strychnine, 207 
Salts, mineral, 136 
Saprophitic bacteria, 195 
Sarcine, 195 
Saturn, origin, 81 
Scaphoid bone, 67 
School, demands of, 474 
Schools, functions of, 472, 473 
Schultz, Dr. Adolph H., viii 
Sciatic nerve, 289 
Scottish Brothers, 24 
Scrotum, formation of in fetus, 17 
Scurvy, 142, 231 
Sea anemone, skin of, 300 
Sebaceous glands, 15 
Secretin, 151 
Secretion, system of hormone, 334 
Seidell, on antineuritic properties, 144 
Self-control, 360 
Self-preservation, 360, 466 
Seminiferous duct, 18 
Sensations, 454 
Sense, kinesthetic, 302. 349. 405 
Sensori-motor mechanism. 273, 378, 
428 
organization, 273 
Sensory areas, 316 
impulses, 315 
nerve, 307 
nerves, 303 
organs, 318 
Sensuality, 451 
Sentimentality, 451 
Septicemia, 198 
Sera, cell-dissolving, 177 
Serum, anti-bacterial, 200 
antitoxic, 200 
Sex, beginnings of, in protozoa 105 
differences, 106 
in birds, 106 
glands, 244 
hormones, 226 
infantilism, 239 
maturity, 232, 233 
Sex-complex, 431, 438, 441, 4464 45] 
Sex-hunger, 466 


507 


INDEX 


Sex-impulse, 448 
Sex-psychoses, 439 
Sex-transformation, 234 
Sexual characters, secondary, 58 
differences, in man and in ani- 
mals, 58 
infantilism, 217 
perverts, 444 
precocity, 238 
reproduction, 430 
Sight, use of, 408, 409, 410 
Sigmoid curve, 26, 27 
Silicon, 137, 154 
Simiidae (manlike apes), 49 
Siva, the Destroyer, 479 
Skeletal muscles, 214, 361, 436 
Skin, color determination of, 40 
color of, 14 
glands of, 15, 16 
ridges of, 14 
structure of, 14 
Skull, 28 
shape of, 42 
Sleep, cause and function of, 397-398 
Sleeping-sickness, 199 
cure for, 200 
in Uganda, 199 
Smallpox, cure for, 200 
germs of, 196 
Smell, sense of, 12 
Snails, pre-Cambrian, 62 
Society, organized, problems of, 469, 
470 
Sodium, 83, 137, 292 
Sodium chloride, 83 
Soil, bacteria in, 131 
Soma, body cells, 3 
Soma-cells, 258 
Somatic behavior, 267, 416 
reaction, 299 
receptors, 298 
South Sea Islanders, 199 
Species sapiens, 204 
Speech, effect on man, 57 
Sperm, and heredity, 10° 
behavior of, 111 
Spermatogonia, 111, 229, 23u 
Spermatozoa, 177: 


Spermia, male germ-cell, 2 
Sphenodon, 218 
Sphenoid bone, 215 
Spinal cord, 310 
formation, 10 
Spine, changes in, 34, 35, 68 
qualities of, 26 
Spirillum, 195 
Spirochetes, 196 
Spleen, 220 
where found, 202 
Sponges, 75 
Sponsler, on cellulose, 140 
Sporozoa, 96, 189, 190 
Sporozoan Plasmodia, 189 
“Sports,” 100 
Standing, use of muscles injsos 
Standpoint of the Newer Psychology, 
From the, 416—487 
Staphylococci, 195 
Starch, forms of, 139, 140 
varieties of, 140 
Starches, dextrin of, 15] 
Starfish, 76 
productivity of, 98 
Starvation, subnormal 
accompanying, 183 
Stature, changes in last million years, 


temperature 


determination of, 33 
increases in from birth, 32 
Steapsin, 150 
Stegocephalia, origin of, 73 
Steinach, on Leydig cells, 231 
Sternalis muscle, 30 
Sternum, 26 
Stimuli, 29] 
fearful, 364 
receptor of, 279 
Stimulus from visceral organ, 399 
noxious, 346 
Stomach, capacity of, 135 
formation of, 19 
muscles of, 135 
treatment of foods, 135 
work of. 146 
Strepto-bacteria, 195 


508 


INDEX 


Streptococci, 195, 199 
Structures, vestigial, 301 
Strychnine, dose of, 198 
Styloid process, 7 
Sub-linguals, where found and use of, 

184 
Sub-maxillaries, where found and use 

of, 184 
Succus entericus, 151 
Sucrose, 146 

cane sugar, 139 
Sugar 

cane, molecular weight, 141 

metabolism, 219 
Sugars, three complex, 139 
Sulphates, 88 
Sulphur, 137 

in red blood-cells, 175 
Sun, offsprings of, 80 
Sunstroke, 181 
Suprarenals, 208, 209 
Survival, methods of, 99 

of the Fittest, 101 
Suture, 28 

closing of, effect on head, 28 
Swallowing center, 134 
Swamis, 462 
Sweat, 180 

glands, 15 

number of, 180 

Symmetry, bilateral, 75 
Symphysis, 236 
Symptoms, of emotions, 212 
Synapse, 289, 290, 332 
Synapses, 307, 312 

resistance of, 207 
Synaptic system, 290 
Synthesis, of man, 132 

of plants, 132 
Syphilis, 198, 199, 231 

cure for, 200 

germ of, 196 
System, autonomic, 324, 325 

nervous, 213, 214 
glandular, 346 
lymphatic, 154 


System, lymph vascular, 161 
neuromotor, 207 
neuromuscular, 182 
of hormone secretion, 384 
peripheral nervous, 323 
synaptic, 290 
urogenital, 209, 253 
vasomotor, 170, 180, 182 
visceral, 346 


Tactile organ, 299 
Taenia, or tapeworm, 188 
Tail, signs of in man, 27 
Tails, prehensile, 67 
Takahashi, 143 
Takamine, on Adrenin, 210 
Tears, use of, 14 
Teats, true, 72 
Teeth, bicuspids, 19 
incisors, 19 
molars, 19 
milk, 36 
number of, in animals, 19 
number of, in man, 19 
use in Eocine time; 71 
variation in, 19, 20 
wisdom, 36 
Temperature, of body, 147 
Tendons, 311, 347, 349 
Testes, 221 
Testut, anatomist, 28 
Tetanus, 207, 221 
gastric, 351 
Tetany, infantile, 207 
Carlson on, 207 
Tethelin, 215, 216 
Theory, vasomotor, 397 
Therapeusis of Internal Diseases, 
Billings-Forchheimer, viii 
Thinking, 380, 381 
method of, 382, 383, 384 
Watson on, 383 
Thomas, Dr. W. I., viii, 475 
Thomson (quoted), 102 
experiment with bacteria, 132 
on chromosomes, 113 
on the bee, 62 
Thorax, 162 


309 


INDEX 


Thought, creative, and education, 474 
Threadworms, 75 
Thrombin, 160 
Thrombosis, 161 
Thumb, opposibility of, 66 
Thymus gland, 19, 208, 230, 238 
functions of, 208 
Riddle on, 208 
where found, 208 
Thyroid gland, 19, 206, 222, 230, 238, 
239 
description of, 204 
ducts, 204 
effect of removal, 204, 205 
hormones, 225 
where found, 202 
Thyroid cartileges, 8 
Thyroxin, 205, 240 
secretion of, 206 
Tibia, 342 
Time-table, genealogic, 60 
geologic, 63 
Tissue, 159 
adipose, 156 
connective, 6, 208 
invasion of, 198 
lymphoid, 134 
Toad ointment, uses of, 210 
recipe for, 210 
Toes, coming and going, 27 
extra, cause of, 24, 25 
Tonsillitis, cures for, 221 
Tonsils, 221 
variation in, 20 
Toxemia, 198 
Toxic goiter, 205, 239 
Toxin, tetanus, 198 
Toxins, effects of, 182 
Trachea, 169 
Trachoma, germs of, 196 
Tree-sloths, grasping organs of, 66 
Treponema pallidum, 196 
Trichina, 188 
Tr1-iodo-tri-hydro-oxyindole propionic 
acid, 206 
Triplets, frequency of, 22 
Trypanosomas, 189 
carriers of, 199 


Trypsin, 150, 151 
Trypsinogen, 150, 151 
Tuberculosis, 234, 256 
acute, 199 
cures for, 221 
Tumescence, 432, 433 
Tumors, from notochord, 7 
Twins, artificially produced, 25 
cause of, 23 
identical, development of, 23 
how distinguished, 23 
variations in, 99 
occurrence of, 22 
“Siamese,” 24 
Two-headed Nightingale, The, 24 
Tympanic cavity, 8 
Tympanum, 13 
Types, extreme, 43 
Typhoid, 198 
cure for, 200 
Tyrannosaurus rex, 69 


Ultramicroscopic bacteria, 196 
Umbilical cord, 4, 73 
Ungulates, 141 
Universe, social, units of, 470 
Upper Carboniferous Age, 73 
Uranium, atomic number, 85 
atomic weight, 85 
Uranus, origin, 81 
Urea, 88 
Uremia, 221 
Uric acid, 220 
Urogenital system, 209, 253 
Use of nose, 411, 412 
of sight, 408, 409, 410 
Uterus, 216, 225, 229 
action of adrenin on, 211 
formation of in the fetus, 17 


Variations, atavistic, 31 
acquired, 100 
chance, 100 
continuous, 100 
in systems, 19 
orthogenetic, 100 
predetermined, 100 
progressive, 32 


O10 


INDEX 


Vitamin, antineuritic, 142, 143 


Variations, range of, 31 . 
retrogressive, 31 
selected, 100 
Vas deferens, 231 
Vasa vasorum, 167 
Vasectomy, 231 
Vasomotor apparatus, 167 
nerves, 234 
organization, 457 
theory, 397 
Veins, 159 
Venez cave, 162, 165, 167 
Ventricles, 165, 167 
formation of, 22 
Venus, origin of, 81 
Vermiform appendix, 20, 21, 136 
Vertebra, cervical, 26 
first, 7 
lumbar, 26, 35 
of negro, 41 
thoracic, 26 
Vertebral column, 
- Vertebrates, 7 
legs of, 67 
sense of smell in, 69 
Vestigial structures, 301 
Vibrisse, 15 
Villi, in small intestine, 136 
Violet, Visual, 412 
Viruses, 196 
Viscera, 236, 303, 316, 340, 361 
abdominal, 4, 21, 235 
muscles of, 326 
necessary in all life, 61 
Visceral behavior, viii, 267 
dynamics, 352 
muscle, 361 
organ, stimulus from, 
processes, 416 
reaction, 299 
receptors, 298 
system, 346 
Vishnu, the Creator, 479 
Vision, axis of, 409 
Visual violet, 412 
Vitalism, 96 
Vitamin A, 144 
where found, 143 


composition, 26 


399 


antirachitic, 142, 143, 144 
antiscorbutic, 142, 144 


Vitamin B, 144 

Vitamin C, 144 

Vitamin D, 144 

Vitamin X, 144 

Vitamins, 142 

Viviparous animals, 73 

Vocal cords, development, 20 


mechanism, 374 


Voice, first, 20 
Volcanoes, use of, 82 
Volvox, colonies of, 105, 106 


hermaphroditic, 106 
unisexual, 106 


Walking, 35 
Wallace, 101 
Walter, formulation of Mendel’s law, 


114 


Washburn’s Animal Mind, 270 
Water, a solvent, 87, 88 


amount in human body, 137 
importance of, 136 

behavior of, 87 

chemical reactions in, 88 

on earth, 81, 82 

per cent in body, 87 
excretions of, 88 


Water-soluble B, 143 
Watson, Dr. John B., viii 


on light, 293 

on love, 433 

on nerve system, 333 
on thinking, 383 
quoted, 470, 471 


Waves, Hertzian, 296, 298, 306 
Weight, increase in body, 37 


Weismann, “biophores,” 


increases in from birth, 32, 35 

113 

doctrine of continuity of germ- 
plasm, 103 

on death, 251 


Wells, H. G., Outline of History, 40 
Whales, adaptations of, 99 
Wheelworms, 75 

Whooping-cough, 199 


511 


INDEX 
Wiggam, The New Decalogue of World War, 141, 143, 144 


Science, 119 Wrist, joint of, 67 
Wirsung, duct of, 219 turtles, 67 
Wolffian body, cortex derived from, 

209 Yaws, cure for, 200 
Wolffian ducts, 17 Youth, heartbeats of, 166 


changes in, 17 
Women, change in after fifty, 38 Zone, erogenous, 432, 439, 440 


heartbeats of, 166 Zymase, 147 
Woodruff (quoted), 107 Zymogen, activator of enzymes, 148 
study of paramecium, 98 Zymogenic bacteria, 195 


512 


JON) ; i q 
Cs ae 
i ¥ fn a AA re, 


‘ 
nih) 


a 
f 
ene 




















































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































